Residents in Chicago's South Shore neighborhood experienced a welcome relief as ComEd crews successfully restored electricity to two condo buildings early Monday morning, following an arduous night without heat, light, or elevator service in frigid conditions. The power outage began just past 4 p.m. on Sunday near 73rd and South Shore Drive, leaving at least 183 customers enveloped in the cold and dark as temperatures plunged, ABC7 Chicago reported.
In the face of dipping lakefront temperatures, a city bus was parked outside the buildings to provide some warmth to the residents—temperatures that resident Shanelle Coleman remarked, "are actually at least 12 degrees colder." While dealing with the outage, resident Trachon Carson expressed discontent to ABC7 Chicago, stating, "Those conditions are not acceptable. Like I said, to be paying the kind of money, it's not cool."
The root of the blackout, per ComEd, was traced back to an underground cable fault. As the news coverage on YouTube revealed, the Chicago Fire Department was on the scene, rotating their crews for about 12 hours, and necessitated the pumping out and drainage of the basement before repairs could commence.
Reportedly, conditions began to improve around 1:45 a.m. on Monday with both ComEd's website and a statement acquired by a local news channel indicating that the restoration of power was scheduled for 6:00 a.m. Confirming the restoration, residents walking out of their high-rise building earlier this morning indicated they finally had power. "You can imagine with these frigid temperatures, really hard not to have power overnight," a reporter conveyed on the YT news segment. The return to normalcy, however late in the coming, was surely a relief for residents awaiting inside. Nevertheless, behind the scenes, the fire department, the city, and ComEd crews were hustling to mitigate the issues, so often an inevitable consequence of winter's onset.
