Substation fire knocks out power to 9,000 By:the Times Staff July 23, 2001 Within three hours of a fire that severely damaged transformer No. 1 at Entergy’s Harrison West Electrical Substation, the utility’s repair crews had restored power to 95 percent of the 9,000 affected customers. Local Entergy officials haven't determined the cause of a fire Thursday evening that knocked out power to thousands of customers and caused lights to flicker for thousands of other customers. According to Mike Brown, Entergy's customer service manager for Harrison, an electrical fire at 5:15 p.m. Thursday, July 19, "severely damaged transformer No. 1 at Entergy's Harrison West Electrical Substation. Initially, almost 9,000 customers were involved in the outage."

Brown credited the Harrison Fire Department for helping minimize damage to the adjacent substation control house as the transformer fire was brought under control. Entergy forces were able to get 95 percent of affected customers' service restored by 8 p.m. All customers served by the substation had their service restored by 11 p.m.

A mobile, temporary substation transformer arrived on site early Friday morning and should be installed and operational by this afternoon. Until that transformer is operational, all industrial customers serviced by the station are contributing to the repair effort by drastically reducing their electrical load or not operating during the day Friday, Brown added.

A spokesman at American Freightways said the corporation is using its four backup diesel generators to minimize its drain on electrical power and is turning off lights. "Service hasn't been interrupted and employees are doing their jobs."

The cause of the fire is still under investigation and Entergy may not have a definite idea until the damaged transformer can be examined internally by Entergy's substation department, Brown concluded.

http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?brd=1815

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), July 24, 2001