New Year’s Eve winds cause outages

A brief, but windy storm passed through the Holly Springs Utility Department service area New Year’s Eve, leaving behind several outages affecting some electric customers.

The largest outages affected full circuits out of Coldwater and Slayden substations. The breaker at Coldwater was reclosed and power was restored without incident. Crews restored the Slayden line in sections. While there was another tripped line breaker and a blown fuse on Roberts Chapel Road, no actual line damage was found on either circuit.

During the same time frame, an apparent lightning strike caused a breaker problem that left most Ashland customers in the dark.

“Due to the continuing work at Ashland, we still have one breaker out of service, causing the outage to be larger than it normally would be,” said HSUD General Manager Bill Stone. “We had two circuits out due to the shared breaker but, fortunately, our service crew was already in the area and was able to quickly restore power. We found a piece of line equipment that appeared to have been struck by lightning, triggering the outage.”

A downed line over a creek on McAlexander Road had to be rebuilt, which took a crew most of the afternoon. Crews finished up the day restoring several small and individual outages, mostly in the Holly Springs, Red Banks and Victoria areas.

In what could be another weather-related issue, Wednesday night of last week, a vehicle struck a pole on Holder Road (in Tennessee), causing an outage in northern Benton and Hardeman counties. Some customers were without power several hours Thursday morning as crews struggled through wet and muddy conditions to replace the pole and rebuild the line.

“We are very proud of the dedication of our electric department employees through difficult and dangerous conditions,” Mayor Kelvin Buck said. “They go above and beyond in reacting quickly to trouble and providing the best service they can to their customers.”