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How did a planned power outage go for a Midlands community that was without electricity for hours on Wednesday?
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The town of Batesburg-Leesville saw much of its downtown shutdown Wednesday morning by a planned power outage. Power to the town was planned to be shut down for about three hours between 7 a.m. and 10 a.m. as Dominion Energy made infrastructure improvements meant to boost service to the western Lexington County community.
Batesburg-Leesville Town Hall and the local post office were both without power Wednesday morning, as were several businesses along Church Street and Highway 1. Town services were operating on a delayed start because of the outage.
“I had a couple businesses call, because the communication goes to whoever does the billing, not necessarily the building where the people are,” said Town Manager Jay Hendrix. “They called and said ‘do y’all have power?’”
A Dominion spokesman said the company was able to re-energize the affected area ahead of schedule, with power being switched back on around 9:04 a.m. About 110 customers in the middle of Batesburg-Leesville were affected.
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Dominion said the outage to the town of 5,000 was necessary because Batesburg-Leesville is currently fed from a single source, which makes it vulnerable to disruption if bad weather takes it out.
The new system will allow for a more reliable power supply feeding from multiple substations around the Batesburg-Leesville area, but it also requires that more than 100 transformers get replaced across the region. As the system is switched over, power will be temporarily dropped to each service area, so the transmission can be changed.
Dominion has spent $13 million to refurbish its power transmission system stretching some 60 miles from the Lake Murray dam to the Savannah River, including the construction of new substations to supply the new voltage and provide more backups to the system to ensure it stays online. The changeover should be completed by the end of next year.
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