Investigation of
substation fire
is continuing
LAURINBURG — Despite occurring a month ago, there aren’t many clues on what exactly caused the explosion at the city’s new power substation.
The substation, which is located on Hall Street, caught fire on July 21 around 4:20 p.m. The fire took about 20 minutes to get under control and power was only out to customers in part of the city for several minutes.
The substation, which had only been operational for a few weeks at the time, was designed to spread the demand of the city’s existing power system and officials are unclear as to what exactly malfunctioned and caused the accident.
City Manager Charles Nichols spoke to the City Council on Tuesday with an update on what has been going on since the fire.
“I’d love to have more answers right now,” Nichols said. “We’ve had Duke Energy post-pone our meetings with insurance and everything twice. We are scheduled to meet on Aug. 31 — at this point we’re in limbo waiting on insurance companies to give us clearance.”
Nichols explained that, right now, the city is unable to do any clean up of the substation besides oil that came from the explosion.
“What our engineers think the issue was, is you have Duke’s main transmission line that comes into our substation,” Nichols said. “So there’s a lot of equipment, we do know it’s an equipment failure, but there is a Duke controlled transformer that failed basically. When it failed it blew and there was some scrap metal that they think landed in the transformer and caused the fire.”
Nichols explained that the postponement came from the power outages from the Hurricane Isaias that Duke has been working on. He continued that there should have been a breaker that should have tripped when things went wrong as well that also failed.
“It’s something extremely unfortunate,” Nichols said. “We think there’s some workarounds, but we don’t want to get too deep into it. We do have one transformer still on site, the system was built for growth and basically, each transformer could run the whole city. That’s set aside from what we have on West Boulevard already.”
“As soon as we know more, what can be salvaged and what can be done there are options our engineers have been running about some workarounds,” Nichols said. “We’re still moving on with the recircuiting of the entire grid … it was an equipment failure and like I’ve said it was a bad event, we had some video and pictures and we’re fortunate no one was hurt. It wasn’t anything any person could have avoided.”
Reach Katelin Gandee at kgandee@laurinburgexch.wpenginepowered.com.