(Smith County Insider Press) Carthage, Tenn. – Wednesday afternoon’s power outage was caused by a bulldozer.
On Wednesday, February 1, a resident in the Turkey Creek community was excavating a piece of property, when he accidentally cut a guy-wire or “down-guy” that was supporting three high-voltage electric poles. The electric poles contained main transmission lines that carry electricity from the Cordell Hull Dam to Smith County and surrounding areas.
The picture below shows that the pole to the right lost its “down guy” and leaned into the adjacent (center) pole causing a critical clearance issue for the TVA. The lack of sufficient safe approach clearance, due to the extreme amount of high voltage, required the TVA to take the line out of service in order to repair the guy and place the structure back to normal clearances. There was approximately 24 inches between the two lines.
Due to the two high voltage lines being so close together, there was great risk of a flashover or electrical explosion. The TVA was forced to repair the guy-wire quickly, which gave very little notice to the public about the outage.
The outage on the Transmission Line (161,000 volts) resulted in loss of service to UCEMC’s North & South Carthage Substations with the corresponding distribution outage to a vast area of Smith County and fringe areas of Wilson, Macon and Jackson Counties.
Approximately 8,000-9,000 homes and businesses were out of service for just over one hour beginning at 5:13 pm.
Although this was a TVA initiated outage that could be postponed nor avoided, UCEMC regrets any inconvenience this may have caused to its members.
