When an electrical transformer blew Wednesday evening, some downtown businesses had to make the best of the situation. Customers just had to pause and be patient.
An underground fault triggered the transformer to explode at about 9:40 p.m. near the downtown Wells Fargo parking garage, leaving more than 1,900 Gainesville Regional Utilities customers without power, said Samantha Susock, a GRU corporate communications intern.
About 1,500 customers regained power in less than a minute, and power was restored to the remaining 400 in a little less than an hour.
Many restaurant and bar guests had to wait for the power to kick back on in order to resume normal business.
Some businesses were able to make light of the situation such as Dragonfly Sushi, located near the Hippodrome State Theatre.
“We turned it around into a positive experience by lighting some candles and handing out some champagne,” said Dave Piasecki, the general manager of Dragonfly.
Piasecki said that customers were understanding and knew the power outage was not the restaurant’s fault.
“We lost about 30 minutes worth of sales,” Piasecki said, adding that the restaurant had to give away some free food.
However, other restaurants were not as fortunate. Some had to operate credit card machines on battery power until they died, and customers grew impatient.
Mel Crawford, owner of Sweet Mel’s on University Avenue, said the night started as a busy one. But after the outage, she was forced to turn away customers and send employees home early as a safety precaution.
“It might not be much, but those extra to-go boxes and stuff like that costs us money,” she said. “It might only be pennies, but it still cost us something.”
A version of this story ran on page 4 on 1/17/2014 under the headline "Businesses cope with outage"
