Power restored for area following 4,000-customer outage

Published 12:13 am Tuesday, August 19, 2014

WOODVILLE — An equipment malfunction at a power substation in Woodville led to a power outage Sunday for more than 4,000 residents that lasted until Monday evening.

Entergy spokesman Tim Runnels said initial reports showed lightning likely damaged equipment at the substation, which caused nearly three miles of transmission line to malfunction.

“These are the big, heavy cross country lines, so it’s not something that can be fixed quickly,” Runnels said. “On top of that, we had storms come through (Sunday) that caused some major issues in slowing down the process of getting it fixed.”

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Runnels said the outage began at 4 a.m. Sunday morning and most customers had power restored between 5 and 6 p.m. Monday.

Entergy brought in additional crews from south Mississippi and Louisiana to assist in the restoration efforts.

Runnels said he was unsure of exactly how many customers were impacted by the outage.

An interactive outage map on Entergy’s website listed two areas — one in Woodville and another in Centreville — as having the most amount of customers impacted Monday.

The Woodville listing showed 919 customers impacted, while the Centreville listing showed 1,328 customers.

“I can’t remember anything quite like this that didn’t involve a hurricane or something like that,” Runnels said. “The crews are finishing up the work now and going through the final processes, but it’s been a long outage.”

Southwest Mississippi Electric Power Association spokeswoman Azalea Knight said 2,250 Wilkinson County residents were impacted by the outage. All residents those impacted had powered restored at 5:15 p.m., Knight said.

Southwest MS EPA purchases power from South Mississippi Electric in Hattiesburg, who is responsible for the generation and delivery of electric power to each of Southwest’s 16 substations. Southwest Mississippi Electric purchases transmission service to deliver power to Southwest’s substations from Entergy Mississippi.

Knight said Entergy is responsible for the inspection, maintenance and operation of the transmission lines that provide service to the Woodville substation.