Outage at Woodville substation leaves thousands without power
Published 5:19 pm Monday, August 18, 2014
Update 5:33 p.m. — Power was restored to the majority of customers in the Woodville and Centreville area at 5:15 p.m. Monday.
An interactive outage map on Entergy’s website still shows some residents without power around the Woodville area.
WOODVILLE — An equipment malfunction at a power substation in Woodville led to a power outage Sunday for more than 4,000 residents, all of whom were still without power as of Monday afternoon.
Entergy spokesman Tim Runnels said initial reports showed lightning likely damaged equipment at the substation, which caused nearly three miles of transmission line to malfunction.
“These are the big, heavy cross country lines, so it’s not something that can be fixed quickly,” Runnels said. “On top of that, we had storms come through (Sunday) that caused some major issues in slowing down the process of getting it fixed.”
Runnels said he was unsure of exactly how many customers were impacted by the outage. An interactive outage map on Entergy’s website listed two areas — one in Woodville and another in Centreville — as having the most amount of customers impacted. The Woodville listing showed 919 customers impacted, while the Centreville listing showed 1,328 customers.
“I can’t remember anything quite like this that didn’t involve a hurricane or something like that,” Runnels said. “The crews are finishing up the work now and going through the final processes, but it’s been a long outage.”
Southwest Mississippi Electric Power Association spokeswoman Azalea Knight said 2,250 Wilkinson County residents were impacted by the outage.
Southwest MS EPA purchases power from South Mississippi Electric in Hattiesburg, who is responsible for the generation and delivery of electric power to each of Southwest’s 16 substations. Southwest Mississippi Electric purchases transmission service to deliver power to Southwest’s substations from Entergy Mississippi.
Knight said Entergy is responsible for the inspection, maintenance and operation of the transmission lines that provide service to the Woodville substation.