Most of the customers of the Vanceburg Electric Plant Board will experience a couple of brief power outages Tuesday morning as crews work to replace a switch at Bradford Lane at Black Oak.
Plant Board Superintendent Bill Tom Stone said the first outage will be about 6:00 a.m. and will last for an estimated 30 minutes. The second planned outage will be a few hours later and will also last about 30 minutes, if things go as planned.
Stone said all customers west of St. Paul (from Nelson Brothers to Vanceburg) will experience the outages.
“What the contractor is going to do is turn off the entire system from St. Paul down to disconnect the area at Bradford Lane. The system will be powered back up while the switch is being installed on the disconnected portion and after the installation is complete, the system will be turned off again to allow that circuit to be placed back online, then the power will be back on for all customers,” Stone said.
He said he hopes the outages are shorter than expected but in dealing with the high voltages the workers take every safety precaution.
Stone said the switch that is being replaced caused an outage several weeks ago when it shorted. He said the replacement switch will cost several thousand dollars but is needed to isolate portions of the system to keep extensive system-wide power failures to a minimum.
