CULLMAN, Ala. – “We understand everyone’s concern over the timing of this planned outage, especially with such high temperatures during the day,” Cullman Electric Cooperative (CEC) Manager of Communications & External Affairs Brian Lacy said of this Tuesday’s planned power outage in south Cullman County. “Our engineers have explained why this outage needs to happen now, and why it cannot wait until a later date.”
The outage will begin at 9 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 10 and last approximately five hours.
“The biggest thing people seem to misunderstand is this is not regularly scheduled planned maintenance being done by TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority),” he said. “This is TVA proactively responding to a piece of equipment that has sensors which indicate it could fail at any time. If that were to happen, it could result in a major power outage that could take up to a day or longer to repair.”
Lacy said the fix will take place at a TVA transmission facility that feeds power to substations in the southern part of Cullman County.
Approximately 3,500 members will be impacted- those served by the Bremen substation located at the intersection of Alabama Highway 69 and County Road 222.
The communities that will be impacted by the scheduled power outage are Arkadelphia, Black Bottom, Bremen, Bug Tussle, Colony, Crane Hill, Damascus and the southeast side of Smith Lake.
According to Lacy, the TVA found a failing piece of equipment at its switching station on borrowed time. He said if the proactive approach isn’t taken now, the device will fail – sooner rather than later- and could have worse consequences.
“If it fails before it can be repaired on Tuesday evening, the unplanned outage will be much longer. And depending on how catastrophically it fails, it could damage other equipment making the restoration that much more time-consuming,” he said.
“Waiting to make the repair until Tuesday is risky, but we know that we need to wait to give our members advanced notice and to select a day and time that will affect the least amount of households, businesses and schools,” said Lacy.
A week ago, members experienced a widespread outage following a storm. The TVA and CEC stated both are taking corrective actions necessary that could prevent another major unplanned outage like the one members experienced during the storm and two other planned outages which occurred in the spring.
“Our last planned outage was last week in Jones Chapel to repair a piece of equipment that was damaged by lightning. That project went as planned and actually was completed ahead of schedule,” Lacy said.
“Prior to that we had two planned outages in the spring. One was a voltage conversion in Center Hill near Hanceville that was done on a weekday morning in May and was completed within 30 minutes of the scheduled time. The other was a TVA planned outage that was done overnight and went as scheduled.”
When asked if there would be cooling stations open in the regions that will be affected by the planned outage, Lacy said one of the reasons for announcing the planned outage is to help members better prepare ahead of time.
“One of the main reasons we share information about planned outages is to allow people time to make accommodations. Power outages, whether they are planned or unexpected, are unavoidable. We recommend anyone who has life-sustaining medical equipment always have an alternate power source available,” he said.
Stay with The Cullman Tribune as updates are made available during the planned power outage Tuesday night.
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