LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — After smoke had been reported in an area of downtown Little Rock on Wednesday night, fire officials were on the scene within moments to asses what exactly was going on.
An underground electrical fire had apparently started near the Arkansas Repertory Theatre on 6th Street.
Little Rock Fire Department Captain Jason Weaver explained that when his crews arrived, they saw smoke coming out of the manhole covers in the area.
"The fire department did not make entry. We don't work in the confined space with all that being electrified but we made sure it didn't spread anywhere and it self-extinguished," Weaver described.
A few moments later, Entergy crews called on the scene when a circuit was lost downtown and caused several businesses in the area to lose power.
Entergy crews worked to figure out the issue and then dropped the network to be able to isolate the fault in the manhole. A little over two hours after the incident began, power was restored to the nearby businesses.
Crews worked to assess and repair about 500 damaged copper cables that had been burned in the fire
"We're having to clean up all the soot and fire and pull out the old cable. Then we gotta pull in the new cable and make all the connections back up," said Tony Dunlap, the Underground Network Superintendent for Entergy Arkansas.
They're working to clean things up and restore power to a few of the office buildings in the area because the main breaker was inside the manhole that caught on fire.