Blackout-the whole town's dark
Massive power outage hits Clay County on Monday
By Frank Bradley Sentinel writer

FRANK BRADLEY/Sentinel photo Bill Brechbill and David Waldrep at the Hayesville Substation.

My first thought was I forgot to pay the power bill. Then I looked out the window and saw the whole town was pitch black. Surely, everybody in town didn't forget to pay.

At or about 9:15 p.m. on Monday, the electricity went off. The only light in the office was from my computer screen, which operates with a battery backup. I stumbled through a couple of rooms to the front door, got in the car and took a drive to see if anybody nearby had their lights on. It was dark all the way out to the traffic light at the junction of U.S. 64 and N.C. 69. But in less than five minutes since the blackout, someone had managed to appear at the intersection with a yellow vest and a flashlight and was directing traffic. I drove on up to the Georgia line with nary a lighted house. Across the line, you could see the Towns County Jail was lit up, apparently with backup generators. The straight away down to the Hiawassee/Young Harris junction was almost all dark. Only the street light and buildings of Windstream, the Animal Hospital and the gas stations at the junction were lit.

When I got back to the substation across from Mountain Valley Country Store, there was a fire truck, a highway patrolman and a couple of electric company trucks. Four or five workers were inside the substation grounds flashing lights up into the metal girders, transformers and other electrical stuff.

There were several trucks and a couple SUV's with drivers idling their motors and waiting to see what happened.

Bill Brechbill, the county fire chief stopped by to see if they needed help from the fire department. David Waldrep also stopped by to see how long it would be until power was restored. He said he had just gotten a shipment of freshly killed hogs that needed to be refrigerated. He said if it looked like it would take a while, he'd have to call Gainesville and have them send a refrigerated truck up. At 10:04 p.m., the first lights near the sub-station came on: signs at the country store and the BBQ restaurant. Then you could see them coming on at the intersection: at McDonalds, Kerr Drug and the banks. I stopped in at McDonald's and talked to the closing manager, Rose McClure. She said they only had a couple of customers when the power went out.

"They sat in here and talked awhile, then got up and left," she said. "We had the security lights inside. I spent the time cleaning and had the others wash dished by flashlight."

Someone came in and wanted to buy some ice cream, but Rose told him that the ice cream machine went into a heat mode when the power went off and that it would take three hours for it to come back on. He settled for a cup of coffee, and Rose had a fresh pot brewed.

Next door in the Aztex station, Adam Martin and Jason Swint were on duty when the lights went out. They told me there were no customers in the store at the time, so they locked up and waited.

This was the first major power outage to hit these parts in a long, long while.

"We've had trees fall across power lines causing some outages, but I can't remember when we've had a major substation outage," Joe Satterfield, BRMEMC's manager told me on Tuesday. Satterfield said the outage was caused when one of the three new arrestors at the Hayesville Sub-station blew up.

"We haven't yet determined what caused the arrestor to blow up," he said. "It could have been a faulty piece of equipment from the factory or perhaps it had been struck by lightning and had been weakened enough so that the cold damp air set it off."

Satterfield said they would be getting in some new replacement equipment in a matter of days and that it would then only take a half-day or day to replace it. Once we get that equipment switched out, we'll have a chance to analyze it to see if we can find out what the problem was," he said.

"That equipment was energized back in June of 2006, so it's less than two years old," he added. "We would have expected it to last 40 to 50 years."

Satterfield said the Hayesville Sub-station feeds the Woods Grove Sub-station, which in turns provides power for Towns County from Young Harris all the way east, consequently Hiawassee was also without power. Fortunately, BRMEMC had managed to plan ahead some years back and had installed battery monitoring equipment and has a round-theclock dispatcher keeping watch for any problems.

When the outage occurred, the dispatcher notified appropriate personnel and a trouble shooting crew was on the way to the site within minutes. Once they determined the problem, they made the repairs and the power came back on. Satterfield said BRMEMC has a dual-feed system, which was installed in 1995. That system allows them to reroute power from the 161,000 volt TVA line out of Blairsville, which could have been done if they had had a problem that couldn't have been resolved quickly, he said.

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