Sometimes the power to your house or business may go off due to squirrels, lightning, high winds, ice storms, traffic accidents, or equipment failure.

Before you call to report an outage, first try to determine whether the cause of the outage is internal or external. Look inside your house or business for blown fuses or tripped circuit breakers.

Second, look outside to see if your neighbors or others have power. Also, check to see if the service wires from the pole to your house or business may have become disconnected by high winds or tree limbs.

Then call our 24-hour emergency number, 913-573-9522, and be ready to leave us a voice mail message with your name, address, phone number, and the possible cause of the outage.

Because the trouble clerk will be busy calling crews in to repair damage, you may have to leave a recorded message or you may get a busy signal if an unusually large number of customers are also without power. After you call, turn off televisions and inside lights and keep refrigerator and freezer doors closed.

Do turn on your porch or entry light and one inside light so that both you and our power crews can tell when service has been restored. If you see wires down, do not touch or go near them, and keep other family members or employees away from any downed power lines.

To report an electrical outage, call 913-573-9522 or click here

During a major storm such as an ice storm, tornado, or high winds with updrafts known as micro bursts, a wide area of our service territory may have power outages. During times like this you may get a busy signal when you call because an unusually large number of people may be trying to call in at once.

At BPU’s 67th and Riverview trouble call center, we immediately staff up to handle the emergency. The trouble board call system and our personnel are able to answer from one thousand to fourteen hundred calls per hour. Better than 95 percent of the time, no more than a few hundred households are without power. Our crews work long, hard hours restoring service, but it is a task that requires a methodical approach to be done safely and efficiently. And every electric utility follows a basic principle when it comes to restoring power.

Priority goes to the lines that will get the largest customer base back in service the quickest. This would constitute our primary distribution “feeder” circuits. When these major distribution lines stop functioning, we are automatically notified of the time and place of the outage, even without any calls from customers.

We repair the primary lines first because doing so will get electricity back to 1,000 customers or more. The second priority is a “lateral” or fused primary feeder line. Individual services are the last to be fixed because they effect individual areas or only one household is affected.

An example of an individual service problem is where the service line from the pole to the house is down due to high winds or falling tree limbs. Just as a physician first works to start a heart beating before fixing the patient's broken leg, it would do no good to start repairing individual services when the lines that feed that service are still without power. Before calling to report an outage during a severe storm, first look outside to see if power is on in your neighborhood. If the power is on but your house is out, check to see if the service line to your house has been pulled down by a tree limb or blown down.

If it’s necessary to go outside your house to see, be careful of downed lines and stay well away from those that have fallen onto the ground or other structures. Also, check inside your house for blown fuses or tripped circuit breakers before calling BPU’s 24-hour emergency number, 913-573-9522.

If power goes out in your house or neighborhood because of a severe storm or other cause, the safest place to be is inside your house away from windows and electrical appliances.

After reporting power outages on our 24-hour emergency number, 913-573-9522, please stay inside, if possible, and keep children inside until power is restored. If the power outage is lengthy and it is not possible to stay inside, keep yourself and family members away from downed power lines and anything those lines may have fallen across, such as fences, cars and other structures.

Also, beware of damage to the green pad-mounted transformers or secondary pedestals and keep children from touching or playing on or near them. To report a damaged lock or open door on these transformers, call 913-573-9522.

Because we are a municipally owned utility, we maintain streetlights for the community at no charge. This vital service is valued at nearly three million dollars annually and is funded by property taxes in cities without a municipally owned utility.

To report a streetlight malfunction, such as a burned out bulb or a pole down or damaged, call 913-573-9522. If you wish to add new streetlights or upgrade an existing light, please call City Hall at 913-573-5000, and ask for Tim Nick in the engineering department. Each year, the city budget includes funds for streetlight upgrades and for any new lighting needs.

Electric Service Area Grid

Electric Outage Map