Power outage may have been caused by bird
Most of Warren County and McMinnville went black Thursday morning following a mysterious crash of the west McMinnville power substation.
The outage, which happened just after morning rush hour, plunged homes and businesses in the dark and created some short-lived havoc at local intersections, as police routed traffic beneath malfunctioning street lights.
The prevailing opinion about what caused the outage, which lasted just over 15 minutes, was that a bird may have set off the breaker at the open-air facility located in Newtown. However, power crews were unable to find any sign of the culprit. Both McMinnville Electric and Caney Fork Electric draw power from the substation which is fed by the TVA system.
The incident happened just before 9 a.m. yesterday, cutting power to about 8,000 Caney Fork subscribers and about half of McMinnville Electric’s subscribers.
“The majority of our customers were out,” said Danny Sutton, director of operations for Caney Fork. “We weren’t able to find the bird itself, but our best guess is that it was caused by a bird. We did find some evidence of a flash at the location.”
According to MES General Manager Rodney Boyd, the power was brought back online when the substation was rebooted. Had the re-setting of the station not worked, Boyd said MES was ready to go to a backup plan to restore power to its customers.
“We were just getting ready to instate the plan when it came back up,” Boyd said. “We have several different plans on how to restore power given the situation.”
Boyd, who said such outages are very rare, noted the utility, along with the emergency management agency, has emergency plans to handle such unforeseen blackouts.