Alliant rolls out cell phone feature for outage reporting

Alliant Energy has introduced a cell phone feature to ease the reporting of power outages as the summer storm season approaches.

Customers can dial #255 on U.S. Cellular's network to report an electric outage or check the status of an outage already reported. Using the feature connects customers with Alliant's automated outage reporting line.

Smartphone users can use an outage reporting tool at alliantenergy.com. Smart phones are automatically directed to a landing page where customers can report an outage or check the status of their outage. They can check the impact of severe weather across the region with the outage summary tool, which lists outage impacts by county.

Alliant Senior Vice President of Energy Delivery Dundeana Doyle said the tool allows the utility to respond more quickly to outages by helping it determine the size, location and possible cause.

Customers with other phone providers can still report outages by calling 877-740-5050.