Power plug pulled in city

By Steven Stiefel sstiefel@times-journal.com

Thousands of Fort Payne residents were affected by a major power outage Monday morning.

Steve Sax, general manager of the Fort Payne Improvement Authority, said it was the largest outage he has seen other than weather-related power losses.

From Dead Man's Curve to the Wal-Mart Supercenter, just as the work day was getting up to speed, lights suddenly flickered and went dark.

Sax estimated about 2,000 of FPIA's 7,500 customers had service interrupted. Most of the problem was on the west side of Interstate 59, but some customers on Briarwood Avenue were also affected.

The culprit seems to be failure in the control system at an electrical substation, according to Sax.

Big Kmart store manager Russell Brown said the outage "killed us. We had to shut the doors because we had no registers operating. We lost two hours of productivity. It was awful.

"We were in the middle of unloading 2,000 pieces of merchandise and had to finish the job in the dark."

Wal-Mart manager Artie Moore said registers were able to operate for 30 minutes before the backup ran out.

"We lost two hours of selling time because it takes a while to get up to full-force again. I'm just thankful it happened this Monday instead of last Monday when parents were buying back-to-school products," Moore said.

"The entire substation went offline at 9 a.m., and we're still not able to get it back online," Sax said at noon Monday.

Power had been restored to most customers within two-and-a-half hours due to switching to a backup system.

"Our engineers and TVA's are going to determine what happened. We have a technical problem between our system and TVA's. That substation has been operating reliably since 1989, and this is the first problem we've had with it. It's something in the control systems and we just have to hunt down what it is."

http://www.times-journal.com/news/8-14power.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), August 16, 2001

Answers

Curious. Would these be *computerized* control systems??? (Wanna bet there's no more information made available later about this?)

-- Andre Weltman (aweltman@state.pa.us), August 16, 2001.