Car crash blacks out power to OHH, 2 hospitalized

An Olney woman and her 7-year-old daughter are in stable condition in a Wichita Falls hospital after the SUV they were riding in hit a power pole, cutting power to Olney Hamilton Hospital and the southern half of the city, Olney Police Chief Dan Birbeck said on Tuesday.

Chief Birbeck said the crash occurred at about 6:50 p.m. on Monday at Grove Street and Bluebonnet Drive.

He said the 28-yearold woman, whose name was withheld for medical privacy, was riding in the 2012 GMC Arcadia driven by her 27-year-old male partner and their four children. The Olney Volunteer Fire Department responded to the scene, using the jaws of life to extract the woman from the passenger seat, Chief Birbeck said.

The man and three other juvenile passengers, ages 9, 5, and 1 year old, were evaluated at Olney Hamilton Hospital and released. The woman was airlifted and the child was taken by ambulance to United Regional Hospital in Wichita Falls, Chief Birbeck said.

Olney Police Department, Texas ruled out driver impairment, and believe the SUV suffered a mechanical failure that caused it to veer into the pole as it traveled westbound on Grove Street. The pole stayed upright but its support cable broke, Chief Birbeck said.

“What the kids described and what dad described sounds like there was a mechanical failure – the tie rod forced it to veer,” he said. “He tried to force it to go straight and it veered to the right.”

The damage to the pole knocked a transformer offline, plunging Olney Hamilton Hospital into darkness for a few minutes until the backup generator kicked on, hospital maintenance manager Markel Long said.

A crew from Fort Belknap Electric Cooperative, which supplies power to the hospital, had the lights back on within about three hours, Mr. Long said.

Kendall Montgomery, General Manager of Fort Belknap Cooperative, said the electric company estimated that about 85 meters were affected by the outage in Olney.. Texas- New Mexico Power Co. customers also were affected.