ROCK HILL, S.C. — A crow flew into a substation Wednesday night, and the electrical short it caused cut power to roughly 2,000 homes and businesses in Rock Hill.
Some, like Thomas Rainer, lost power for four hours.
"I just sat in the living room, and prayed a lot," he said. "I grabbed my flashlight too."
It's the third time this summer that an animal has caused a widespread power outage. Before it was a squirrel and once a snake.
However, the meeting between Rock Hill city officials and Duke Energy on Thursday was to deal with more complex problems. City officials are concerned about recent outages due to equipment failure at substations -- five of them over the past year. They also have concerns about the response time to fix the outages.
"There's been problems with equipment in the substations not operating properly, or failing," said Rock Hill Utilities Director Scott Motsinger. "We haven't seen these kinds of issues in the last 20, 25 years."
Thursday's meeting produced several actions on the part of Duke Energy and the city of Rock Hill.
The city sent them to Channel 9 in an e-mail:
1. Duke has placed an alarm in the Industrial Park Substation to get notice of outages so they can respond immediately based on remote notification.
2. Duke is considering placing alarms in other substations as well.
3. Duke is investigating the sale of two substations to the City for the City to take over maintenance and responsibility.
4. Duke is working on a faster response time to substation outages so they are sending a service tech each time there is a substation outage whether it is a Duke issue or not.
5. Both entities agree to continue with better lines of communication to enhance our partnerships.
6. Both entities agree that reliability is important and we both welcome the process to consider technical change that will improve substation reliability.
7. Duke has a traditional history of excellent transmission service and we expect that to continue going forward.
Much of the meeting focused on improving response and repair times during major outages at substations.
The alarms mentioned in the e-mail will allow Duke Energy to respond more quickly during an outage.
"They did several things that gave us assurance that their response time will be good, and the reliability will be better," Motsinger said.
As for the animal-related outages, there isn't much that can be done inexpensively. The city has placed netting around the base of the fence at its substations to keep snakes out. It's not so easy for birds and squirrels, but remedies are not fool proof, officials said.
Homeowners realize that some things just happen, but they want to make sure there's a quick fix especially in the heat of the summer.
"Three hours was a long time," said homeowner Cindy Jones, who also lost power Wednesday night. "They need to come to some solutions."
Duke Energy said its partnership with the city of Rock Hill has been successful for a long time. Both sides said Thursday's meeting was a strong step in the direction of providing better service to customers in the area.
Animals cause electrical shorts in Rock Hill substation
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