On April 29, an outage occurred on Sanibel Island at 7:37pm.  A lightning arrestor failed on facilities located west of Rabbit Road on San Cap Road.

LCEC linemen responding to the outage were able to re-route power to adjacent lines, limiting the outage to the smallest possible number of customers.  The outage impacted 941 customers for three hours, 47 minutes and 787 customers for one hour, 16 minutes.  If LCEC had not re-route the power, the outage would have impacted 5,156 customers for an extended period of time.

The cause for the lightning arrestor failure could potentially be the result of damage from the storm earlier this week.  LCEC will analyze the equipment and attempt to determine the root cause of the failure.

LCEC performed comprehensive maintenance on facilities and the impacted facilities were addressed in August, 2007. Maintenance consists of a crew physically visiting each pole, visually inspecting every device on the pole, cleaning all connections, checking all hardware, tightening mechanical connections, and checking lightning arrestors.  In addition, LCEC performs infrared inspections of electric facilities. The August, 2009 and January, 2010 inspections entailed utilization of an infrared camera to detect heating issues indicative of connection problems and lightning arrestor issues.  No issues were detected at this location.  In addition, maintenance of switching equipment was performed at this location April 1, 2010, and no issues were identified.  Lastly, a circuit patrol was performed on April 22, 2010 after an intense lightning storm occurred in Southwest Florida. No issues were identified at that time.

A second outage occured at 1:00am on April 30, due to the failure of a device in the substation.  Protective equipment within the substation detected the failure and properly operated to minimize additional damage.  5,212 customers were impacted. LCEC crews were quickly able to restore power to all customers in less than 90 minutes.  Repairs are underway to replace the damaged equipment.  LCEC will attempt to analyze the failure but due to the damage, it may be difficult to determine the root cause.

Maintenance was performed in the substation earlier this month.  LCEC performs maintenance every spring prior to storm season.  Substation maintenance consists of operating every protective device in the substation, associated equipment, and testing of the protective relaying equipment.  This equipment that was impacted was exercised and no problems were identified during the maintenance.  In addition, an infrared inspection of the substation in January gave no indication of a problem with this equipment.

LCEC understands that power interruptions are inconvenient to our customers. We continue to identify opportunities for reliability improvements and we are focused on meeting our customers’ needs.