Appalachian Power continues investigating fire after fixMay 11 - McClatchy-Tribune Content Agency, LLC - Tyler Bell Charleston Daily Mail, W.Va.
Appalachian Power has the grid completely back online after a Thursday evening underground fire knocked out electricity for hundreds of customers in downtown Charleston. The fire started around 6:30 p.m. Thursday when cables in a manhole on the corner of Hale Street and Virginia Street East failed and caught fire, said Phil Moye, an Appalachian Power spokesman. About 600 customers lost power shortly after that as the cables failed and Appalachian Power de-energized the lines to prevent any further damage. "It's rare to have something like that happen, the underground network is usually very reliable," Moye said. The underground network that carries 12,000 volts of electricity to customers has wires of a thicker diameter than above-ground networks, Moye said, because they're more thickly insulated. After those wires burned in the fire, they needed to be replaced. The company worked through the night to restore power, pulling in workers from nearby areas to assist. "We actually got additional workers from Wheeling, W.Va., and Roanoke, W.Va., to help," Moye said. Crews entered the manholes after the emergency crews finished extinguishing the smoky fire and pumping water out of the chamber. Workers also inspected the other manholes and vaults in the network to ensure similar problems weren't occurring elsewhere on the grid. The power was back on for most customers around 4:30 a.m. Friday, according to a company time-line of the event. Only three buildings were still without power by 9 a.m. Those buildings had power restored around noon Saturday, Moye wrote in an email. The last building, the City National Bank drive-through building that shares a sidewalk with the affected manhole, had power restored around 6 p.m. Saturday. Some customers may have experienced brief outages as portions of the grid came back online, Moye said. "Sometimes, when we're re-energizing facilities, we have to take customers offline briefly," he said. The action is similar in nature to disengaging a clutch when shifting gears. There was another unrelated outage on Saturday when a portion of the grid was shut down to replace a section of above-ground cable, Moye said. The company still is investigating why the cables failed in the first place, Moye said, and they'll likely know the cause later this week. But, inspections of other manholes on the network didn't turn up any evidence that another fire was likely to happen. "The good thing is no one was injured," Moye said. "It's certainly an inconvenience and it's something we wouldn't want to see again." Contact writer Tyler Bell at tyler.bell@dailymailwv.com or 304-348-4850. Follow him at www.twitter.com/Tyler_Bell87. http://www.energycentral.com/functional/news/news_detail.cfm?did=36119629 |