Storms create power outages

Early morning storms Thursday took out power to a large part of the Holly Springs Utility Department service area.

Another heavy round of storms hit late Saturday and caused more problems.

General manager Bill Stone said the first outage Thursday came before 7 a.m. In the Mt. Pleasant area. A couple of lines were down in the Highway 311 and Highway 72 area that affected customers in the Mt. Pleasant and Slayden communities, Stone said.

One of the worst outages to work was on Wildcat Bottom Road where poles had to be rebuilt. That work continued all day Thursday and into the wee hours of Friday morning, tying up several crews there.

There was also a line down on Bonds Loop affecting customers in the Hoover Road, Hudsonville Road and Lamar Road areas. The difficulty there was that crews were late getting there, due to widespread outages, and then it took a long time to complete the job, Stone said.

He thanked the public for reporting an arc which can be very helpful to HSUD, particularly in rural areas.

A pole in the Highway 5 area had a broken crossarm and the pole had to be rebuilt, after removing several trees. The outage affected Northern Benton County and Tennessee customers.

“Crew mobilization over there took some time,” Stone said.

There was also an outage on the east side of Snow Lake and other scattered outages.

All total, there were eight to 10 outages over the period involving about 2,000 customers at one time, Stone said.

HSUD is also concerned about power blinking, he said. Crews worked all day Friday trying to find the problem.

“It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack,” Stone said.

Crews think they have fixed it and then it pops back up.

Stone said the blinking could be due to something as simple as a broken insulator.

“That’s why it is so important for customers to report anytime the power blinks,” he said. “It is top priority, but especially in Benton County where this has been going on a couple of months. It gets better; we think it is something we have done that has fixed it; then it blinks again.”

To report a problem with blinks call HSUD at 662-2524411 or email a report to hsud@hsutilities.com.

More storms Saturday

Saturday, outages were first seen right before midnight, Stone said. The longest lasting one was in the Laws Hill area where one phase of a threephase line was out. He said customers were confused in the Highway 4 to Laws Hill area because one person would be out of power and the lights would be on at their neighbor’s house. The Laws Hill outage took longer to get back on than any of the others.

At the same time outages were affecting customers on the south end of the county. People in the Slayden and Mt. Pleasant communities were also out, so HSUD crews were split between two big trouble spots.

The problem was the feed at the Slayden substation, Stone said. So it was switched over to the load at the Coldwater substation. Everybody was back on Sunday morning, he said.

A tree down on Peyton Road in Holly Springs required crews to put back together the lines, and it was between 11 a.m. And noon Sunday when that problem was resolved.

A large tree also fell and crushed a residence on Peyton Road. No one was injured.

Outages in the Waterford line were due to a line issue near the racetrack on Highway 7 South.

At the peak of the outages an estimated 3,000 to 3,500 HSUD customers were in the dark when the whole rural circuit was down, Stone said.

TVA was set to come Tuesday of this week to help troubleshoot a blinking on and off problem in the Ashland and Benton County areas.

Northcentral

Reports of outages started coming in around 6:30 a.m. Thursday when high winds rolled through, according to Michael Bellipanni, with Northcentral Electric Cooperative.

“After troubleshooting, we discovered lines down and a broken pole off Ridge Road that cut power to roughly 69 members in the surrounding area,” he said. “We had another line down south of Byhalia, as well as a line taken down by a fallen tree on Becky Road. The rest were scattered outages, mainly in Marshall County. At the peak, we worked nine separate outage cases that cut power to around 120 members. Most of those were restored before noon, and all shortly after.

“We are thankful that we dodged the Thursday afternoon event that everyone had predicted!” he said.

Saturday’s storms were more problematic, Bellipanni said.

“The storms Saturday evening were particularly troublesome coming in waves and full of lightning,” he said. “We began to receive outage reports around 9 p.m. As the first wave hit DeSoto County. The storm knocked out a circuit in our Olive Branch substation. Not long after restoring that outage, we lost a circuit coming out of our North Marshall substation due to lightning that affected the Wingo Road and Quinn Road areas.

“Our peak outages were at around 12:30 Sunday morning with about 10 percent of our membership without power,” he said. “Our crews cut that number in half by 1:30 a.m. We were left with a circuit outage running south to Watson and scattered damage outages. We continued working throughout the night until all were restored around 7 a.m. The wind took out limbs and trees that downed lines in three separate areas, but lightning was the main culprit in this event.”

Flooding

County administrator Larry Hall said there was significant, isolated flooding in the lowlying areas of the county.

Flooding was worse in some areas than others because some spots got more rain. There were trees and limbs down caused by straightline winds, he said.

County road crews had to work to get tree limbs and material off the road, Hall said.

The heavy rains that flooded the bottoms took most of Sunday to recede.

“It rained in sheets late Thursday afternoon in downtown Holly Springs,” Hall said. “In other places, it was not as much.”