It’s called an arrestor, but it failed during a jail break of power.
The part, one of three at the Rouse Road substation, plunged much of Kinston and part of La Grange into darkness around 7:30 p.m. Wednesday.
When it failed, an energy reading at one of Kinston’s electrical hubs – a “point of delivery” – signaled two connected substations to go down at Hull Road and Hardee Road as a precaution. It’s the second arrestor at the Rouse substation to fail since March 14, 2012, when a similar incident left more than 8,000 Kinston Department of Public Services customers without power.
“A lot of people refer to arrestors like surge protectors. It’s designed to take an event, a hit – it would take a surge and it would absorb it, and there’d be no event for anyone,” Public Services Director Rhonda Barwick said.
Normally, arrestors should last between 30 and 50 years. This one, like the one in 2012, is about 15-17 years old, installed when the Rouse substation was built.
“We’re concerned that they’re not lasting as long as other arrestors,” Barwick said. “So, we’re going to replace all of them. But, we’re also looking at putting in some additional equipment so that when this event occurs, if it’s ever to occur again, that there’s a breaker from that substation to our point of delivery so it won’t affect any other substation.”
While the new arrestors are a sure thing, the purchase of a breaker isn’t as of yet.
“We are looking into that, and talking with other professionals to see if that’s a valid option,” Barwick said. “Those breakers can be expensive. We want to make sure that’s the right route to take. But it might be something that would also give us extra support there as a backup.”
City employees continue to investigate the cause of the power failure. The two main theories are all three arrestors were defective, or the Rouse substation assumed so much wear-and-tear that two gave out before their time.
“You may think there needs to be a lightning strike or a surge at that moment that makes the arrestor fail – that can happen, but that’s not what always happens,” Barwick said. “It could be that the equipment suffered hits over time, is trying to continue to operate and then it has had all it can and just fails.”
The area around Vernon Park Mall and the neighborhoods nearby were without power the longest. After an outage, city workers go from substation to substation, checking each one to make sure it isn’t damaged and suitable to begin transmitting power again. The mall and those neighborhoods happened to be last on the list.
Lisa Wooten, assistant manager at the Goody’s at Vernon Park Mall, said the unexpected immediacy of the power outage was nerve-wracking. The store had emergency lights that kicked into operation a few minutes after the outage, however.
“It was not a good feeling out here, because I was – there weren’t but two of us, anyway, working that night,” Wooten said.
She added that once the electricity went out, they had to quickly usher customers outside the store and lock the doors. From there, it was a wait to see what to do next.
“It made our deposits look like we were short a whole lot of money because we couldn’t officially close our store like we should have,” Wooten said. “But the security of it was fine. The cops coming out here helped out some because when there was nothing out here but just us, it was black in the parking lot.”
Kinston Department of Public Safety officers arrived and lit up the mall parking lot with spotlights to make it easier and safer for customers and staff to leave. As far as crime during the blackout, it appeared most people behaved themselves.
“We didn’t really have anything out of the ordinary,” KDPS spokesman Woody Spencer said.
Wes Wolfe can be reached at 252-559-1075 or wes.wolfe@kinston.com. Follow him on Twitter at WolfeReports.