Power outage caused by overheated part in circuit breaker

TUPELO, Miss. (WCBI) – A power outage left part of Tupelo in the dark during rush hour Monday evening.

Business was steady Tuesday afternoon at the West Main Dodge’s Chicken Store.

But around 4:30 p.m. Monday afternoon, everything came to a halt.

“The place was desolate, not able to wait on customers, help people or take care of guests or anything,” said Dodge’s store leader Patrick Verner.

For the next hour or so, most of west Tupelo was without power.

Traffic lights weren’t working and at Snap Fitness, people were exercising in the dark.

Tupelo Water and Light Director Johnny Timmons quickly pinpointed the cause of the outage to a part inside of this circuit breaker at the southwest substation known as a trip coil that overheated.

“When that tripping coil burned up, it protected the substation and took the power offline here, in return to that we had to bypass this whole substation, feed power out of the north end of the city and feed power out of the south end of the city to get everybody back up and running,” said Timmons.

The trip coil will cost a few dollars to replace, had it not worked like it was supposed to, a transformer in this substation would likely have caught fire.

That fix would be about a million dollars.

In fact, a transformer did catch fire a few years ago.

“We lost the south transformer years ago to a trip failure.  The substation is designed to run off of one of those two dual transformers but you don’t want to lose a piece of equipment of that cost,” said Timmons.

Timmons says the circuit breaker should be repaired within a couple of days.

Timmons also said some Tombigbee Electric Customers in the Belden and Bissell areas were affected because a TVA line is tied in to the southwestern substation.