By Greg McCord

An unexplained power outage interrupted electrical service in parts of Andalusias downtown area Wednesday afternoon. The outage began about 3:45 p.m. and lasted about 30 minutes.

Areas affected were Opp Avenue, including City Hall, Dunson Street and Scherf Drive.

Royce Whigham, city electrical superintendent, said workers found no obvious reason for the blackout.

A breaker tripped in the central substation down behind the Courthouse. We rode the line out but we couldnt find any physical damage. There was nothing on the line, Whigham said.

He said an unusually high demand for electricity caused by the current heat wave or minor damage to a line could have caused the outage.

It could have been that a small limb fell on a line and burned off, or the high load could have tripped the breaker  were running mighty high loads right now, Whigham said.

An emergency generator at City Hall, installed in the wake of 1995s Hurricane Opal, worked flawlessly and police and utility operations and communications were virtually unaffected by the outage.

http://www.andalusiastarnews.com/news/2000/07/20/0720overload.html

-- Doris (reaper1@mindspring.com), July 20, 2000