Crews race to get power back on after underground fire in downtown Colorado Springs

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KRDO) -- Early Monday morning, residents woke up to flames coming up out of manholes in downtown Colorado Springs. That underground fire led to many nearby residents and businesses going without power.

As of 8:03 p.m., crews were still working on power restoration. So far, 150 of the 280 meters have been restored. The areas highlighted in yellow are still without power:

Kiowa St. between Tejon St. and Nevada Ave. is still closed.

Previous Reporting:

According to the Colorado Springs Fire Department, more than two dozen firefighters responded to the area of Nevada Ave. and Kiowa St. at 2:30 a.m. CSFD reported an underground fire was coming from multiple manholes in the street.

Lt. Aaron McConnellogue, of the Colorado Springs Fire Department, said that firefighters found several manhole covers blown off, and flames shooting up to ten feet into the air.

"There were some initial reports of explosions but we didn't hear any," he said.

But Mariah Jones, who evacuated from her apartment building with her boyfriend and two cats, said that they did hear explosions.

"We were falling asleep on the sofa watching TV and we heard what felt like lightning hit the building," she said. "We went outside and saw blue flames coming out of the ground."

To fight the fire, the power was cut to a large portion of downtown - mostly in the area west of City Hall, in a nine-square block area between Nevada, Platte, Pikes Peak Avenue, and Tejon Street.

McConnellogue said that those streets could remain closed for much of the day, as fire investigators and Colorado Springs Utilities try to determine the cause.

According to Springs Utilities, the fire stemmed from an underground transformer. However, as of 5 p.m., what caused the transformer to catch fire hasn't been publicly identified.

"We can't use water on an electrical fire," he said. "There are dry chemical extinguishers we can use. We can also try to let the fire burn itself out by limiting its oxygen supply."

At 4:45 a.m., authorities declared that the fire was under control, and there were no injuries reported.

"We think that the fire started in a vault that holds underground transformers," McConnellogue explained. "There'll be a vault or a transformer that's actually underground, and they'll have a cover on those there. So, it's an area where all their electrical connections come into. But again, we don't know what the cause of that was. We don't see fires like this very often."

He said that three residents of a nearby apartment building, along with some affected office buildings, were evacuated as a safety precaution.

The downtown bus terminal remained open Monday, but the parking garage above it was closed.

Power was out to City Hall, possibly affecting a City Council work session Monday; also without power were the City Auditorium, the Hyatt Place hotel, and the Downtown YMCA.

Traffic signals were out for at least four intersections where authorities installed temporary stop signs and asked drivers to treat those intersections as four-way stops.

At 4:42 p.m., the City of Colorado Springs said the following traffic signals were still down:

• Nevada/Kiowa
• Cascade/Kiowa
• Pikes Peak/Tejon
• Tejon/Kiowa
• Tejon/Bijou
• Nevada/Bijou

Below is a look at the area still impacted by the outage as of 5:30 p.m.