A brief electrical outage affecting thousands of homes in Green on Friday also apparently grounded a flight at Akron-Canton Airport, temporarily stranding 101 passengers.
The side of a Boeing 717 was punctured when a bridge used to board passengers scraped against the plane during the electrical problem, said July Graham-Weaver, manager of public relations for AirTran Airways.
Flight 201 was to take off at 8 a.m. for LaGuardia Airport in New York City, she said.
The plane was taken out of service, and passengers were rebooked on other flights, Graham-Weaver said.
Airport spokeswoman Kristie Van Auken said the jet bridge scraped the plane because of a sudden drop in electrical power at the airport, located in Green.
She said employees were still investigating what happened, but initially believed the airport lost about two-thirds of its power supply.
She described the problem as ''kind of like an April Fools' Day'' drop that ''caused a lot of equipment at the airport to go haywire.'' The jet bridge moved suddenly up instead of down. A conveyor belt in the baggage claim area went into reverse, she said.
Electrical sensors continued to detect some power coming into the airport, so the backup generators didn't activate, she said.
However, FirstEnergy Corp. said there was a complete loss of power from 7:26 to 7:36 a.m.
Spokesman Mark Durbin said a sleeve on one power line broke loose and fell onto another at South Arlington Road north of Mount Pleasant Road.
The Akron utility switched to another circuit to restore power, and sent a crew out for more repairs, he said.
He said the 10-minute outage affected about 5,000 customers. An additional 2,000 customers served by one of the lines were without power until about 10:30 a.m. About 50 people were without power until repairs were completed about 2 p.m., Durbin said.
He said the outage was confined mostly to Green.
Copyright 2005 Associated Press
