An electrical surge Tuesday triggered an ink spill in the Newspaper Agency Corp. printing plant on Regent Street. A lengthy power outage followed.

The result was that the Deseret News was about two hours late in leaving the presses.Shortly before noon, a power surge caused the ink jets in the press to open, and they flooded a press with black ink. The ink destroyed some printing plates, forcing the composing room to remake them.

"Then while they were cleaning up the press and getting that problem fixed, they had the major power outage," said Robert Truelsen, Deseret News production manager. "That knocked out the whole building except for the front."

When power was restored an hour later, printers had to finish cleaning up the press. Next, a control panel on a conveyor system malfunctioned.

Luckily, many pages had been sent through the typesetter early because of worries that the snowstorm would slow delivery. Also, editions were combined to further save time.

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Still, by the time the press run was finished at about 5:15 p.m., "everybody was waiting. We had (delivery) trucks backed up," Truelsen said.

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