Falling trees cause of outages

Heavy storms dropping lots of rain affected the power grid last week.

Holly Springs Utility Department experienced some long outages due to trees falling over lines in hard to get to places, according to general manager Bill Stone.

There were continual outages, but the biggest one came Monday and Tuesday of the week June 7, he said. Some of his crews put in 18- to 20-hour days, he said.

There were some lightning problems but the biggest problem was soil saturation causing trees to give up their hold on the earth.

A few customers were out for about 20 hours in the Mt. Pleasant area where the storm hit the hardest, he said.

“Trampolines were flying, but it didn’t last long,” Stone said.

There were outages in Benton County where a tree fell on lines and crews got stuck in the mud trying to get in to put lines back up, he said.

An older problem in the transmission line from the Coldwater Substation in Mt. Pleasant to the Slayden substation caused power interruptions. He said the problem has been difficult to troubleshoot and an alternate feed has been set up for about six weeks.

A breaker would hold for a while, maybe weeks, then get tripped again, Stone said.

He said HSUD is getting some help from engineers to try to locate the trouble.

There were pockets of outages, one being McKinsey Lane off Taska Road, where a tree fell on a line. And equipment challenges have contributed to some delays in getting to problems, especially a situation with some equipment breakdowns.

Northcentral Electric Cooperative

Michael Bellipanni, director of marketing and business development for Northcentral, said there were not many problems during the storms last week.

“Outage reports started coming in around 7:45 p.m. Monday,” he said. “We realized that we needed to bring in crews shortly after that, and they worked throughout the night.”

At the peak, Northcentral had 16 outage locations with a little over 500 members out, he said.

“The biggest issue we had was a line that was torn down on Wall Hill Road that fed much of the south part of Northcentral’s system.

“Most of the original outages were restored by midday Tuesday, but others trickled in throughout the day,” he said.

Wind and flooding

County administrator Larry Hall said the county is fortunate to have had no road or culvert washouts. And there was time enough between storms for the water to run off or go down so there was no significant flooding, he said.

Some wind damage over a three-day period and soil saturation caused some tree tops to fall into roads, but rarely blocking a road entirely, he said.

“We actually survived it well,” Hall said.