Area suffers electrical outage
Hallettsville residents, local businesses as well as those residing in the rural areas, suffered from an electrical outage that took place last Thursday and Friday, Aug. 31 and Sept. 1.
According to Hallettsville city administrator/secretary, Grace Ward, the Thursday outage was due to a situation occurring at the St. Mary’s Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) substation.
Ward said the substation feeds the Hallettsville City substation located on CR 1 and the city was left with out electricity from approximately 12:50 to 1:57 p.m.
In addition to the city residents and businesses out of electricity on Thursday, the outage also affected the San Bernard Electric Cooperative (SBEC) customers in the area.
According to SBEC members’ services manager, John Spies, residents who receive electricity from their service were not only out of electricity on Thursday for approximately an hour, but also lost electricity for three hours and 35 minutes on Friday, Sept. 1.
Spies said LCRA was doing some work at its substation that affected an underground line that controls the electrical supply.
“The high load of electricity due to the high temperatures caused an overload and outage took place,” Spies said. “The outage on Friday was due to the high load of electricity causing a switch at the substation to trip leading to it being damaged.”
A report from LCRA regarding the Thursday outage, LCRA public information officer, Clara Tuma, said crews working in the Hallettsville substation dug into an underground cable, which caused an outage. She said the crews repaired the damaged cable.
Tuma said the Friday outage was caused by an animal contacting the LCRA power line in the Hallettsville area, which caused an outage and damage to equipment inside the substation.
Tuma said crews responded and replaced the damaged equipment.
“In both events, crews restored power as quickly and safely as possible,” Tuma said. “The outages were localized and were not caused by tight conditions on the ERCOT power grid.”
