SUMMERSIDE, P.E.I. — A faulty piece of equipment caused much of the City of Summerside to lose power for more than an hour Monday morning.
Summerside Electric crews had been scheduled to shut down part of the grid in order to repair a piece of equipment, however, something went wrong during the shutdown.
Greg Gaudet, the city’s director of municipal services, likened what happened to turning off a switch to replace a lightbulb and having it blow up in your face.
“Basically, what happened was that there was a faulty switch that was open (at the city’s Ottawa Street sub-station), it arched and caused a major issue for the operations personnel, who had to have a city-wide outage to isolate and deal with the issue,” said Gaudet.
Incidents like this are exceedingly rare, he added, and the utility is still investigating to try and find out what happened. Thankfully, no one was injured.
Power was out to the whole city from about 1:30-2:40 a.m.
CJ Arsenault lives next door to the Ottawa Street substation and saw the arc of electricity.
“Around midnight my whole house lit up like there was spotlights all around,” said Arsenault.
“I looked outside and there was a massive electric ball over the power plant. It lasted for about 60 seconds, then (there was) a big bang. I thought for sure the whole place was going to blow.”
Arsenault said he called 911, got his wife and dog in his truck and left the area, just in case. They returned later when police told them everything was OK.
Even though power was restored to the city, Gaudet said another outage will be required to fix more damaged gear.
