Power interrupted to 12,000 customers
By From staff reports
Published in News on June 21, 2012 1:46 PM
About 12,000 Progress Energy customers were without power Wednesday afternoon thanks to equipment malfunctions in two transmission substations.
One substation in Genoa east of Grantham delivers power to Goldsboro residents suffered an outage at 2:06 p.m., putting 4,000 customers in the dark. Power was restored at 2:18 p.m. according to a Progress Energy spokesperson.
Another substation in the Belfast area stopped distributing power at 3:45 p.m. Power was restored to those 8,000 affected customers by 4:10 p.m.
City Traffic Engineer Bobby Croom said the outage affected 13 of the city's traffic lights, most running from U.S. 117 west toward Rosewood. Three lights on N.C. 581 and a few on William Street were affected too, he said.
Jeff Brooks, Progress Energy's spokesperson, said substations act like deceleration ramps from highways as they reduce the voltage from transmission lines to be distributed to homes and businesses. Because of this, a single outage can affect many customers.
Brooks said further outages were not expected and the company likely would not need to perform any maintenance on the substations.