ALBERTON – Some 1,300 Maritime Electric customers in the Alberton area spent most of Monday night in the dark.
Kim Griffin, the utility’s communications officer said the 10:57 p.m. outage was caused by wildlife coming in contact with the power lines. That caused two fuses to blow at the Alberton substation. Crews had to replace the fuses and then spent most of the night trouble-shooting
“If you have an accident or wildlife or trees, the system trips and sometimes resets itself, but if there’s something in the line it will shut it down,” Griffin explained.
She said crews did experience subsequent problems with the fuses and at 5 a.m. Tuesday shut down parts of the Wellington, O’Leary and Alberton substations so that final repairs could be completed. That resulted in about 7,000 customers being without power for about 45 minutes.
Customers in the Alberton area, however, were in the dark most of the night or noticed their power flicking on and off.
“The system kept tripping,” Griffin noted.
(TC Media)
