Windy, Wet Weather Wreaks Havoc on Oxford Power Lines

By Alyssa Schnugg
News editor
alyssa.schnugg@hottytoddy.com

On Sunday, more than 2,400 customers were without power for about an hour after a lightning arrester exploded at the electrical substation near the Oxford Conference Center. Photo provided by Oxford Utilities

The wind and rain this weekend caused some problems for Oxford Utilities and its electric customers with outages on Friday and Sunday.

On Friday, about 1,400 customers had their power interrupted briefly after a tree limb made contact with a main feeder circuit.

“It was wet and blowing into the lines due to the high winds associated with the thunderstorm,” said Oxford Utilities General Manager Rob Neely. “This caused a fault which knocked out power momentarily.”

Outages such as the short one on Friday are why the city trims trees to maintain clearance along overhead electrical circuit rights-of-way.

“We perform preventative trimming throughout the year in an attempt to avoid outages caused by vegetation,” Neely said.

On Sunday, 2,400 customers were without power for about an hour after a lightning arrester exploded at the electrical substation near the Oxford Conference Center.

“This arrester was most likely damaged during Friday’s outage or thunderstorm,” Neely said this morning.

The arrester caused the substation to fail, which knocked out four electrical distribution circuits that serve 2,400 customers.

Oxford Utilities linemen received the outage notification and responded to the substation where they observed the damaged substation transformer and switched power to backup transformer,” Neely said.