Breaker issue, weather cause weekend outages

A breaker malfunction at the South Holly Springs Substation caused a brief but widespread outage Sunday morning that affected customers in and south of the city and customers in Ashland.

Bill Stone, general manager of the Holly Springs Utility Department, said the outage began at 8:02 a.m. when the breaker for the circuit serving the east side of the city failed to operate in response to a line fault. That failure caused a station shutdown that interrupted power on all circuits out of South Holly Springs and Ashland Substations.

“Had the breaker operated as it should have, only customers on the east side of Holly Springs would have experienced a blink and probably nothing else would have happened,” Stone said.

He said crews are not sure of the cause of the fault but did find a loose wire on a transformer and a dead squirrel nearby.

“We don’t know if it was just the loose wire or if the squirrel had something to do with it,” he said.

Engineers found the faulty component in the breaker, which is still under warranty, and it will be repaired as soon as possible. The breaker has been taken out of service pending those repairs and the load moved to another breaker. Most customers were restored within the hour.

Several other, weather-related, outages were also reported. During the rain on Saturday, a blown line fuse in Ashland interrupted power for 25-30 customers in the downtown area. Sunday evening, wind caused a couple of small outages in the Red Banks and Taska areas. Crews were able to quickly restore service to affected customers.

HSUD encourages the public to report any loud noises or flashes that might be electric-related to assist crews in locating problems that cause outages.