Thousands go dark
Published 8:42 pm Friday, May 7, 2010
Thousands of Suffolk residents were left in the dark Friday thanks to a morning power outage that swept through a large portion of west Suffolk.
At around 9 a.m. 11,000 Dominion power customers lost power for 27 minutes, according to Chuck Penn, spokesman for Dominion Virginia Power.
Areas along Routes 58, 10 and 460 into Windsor were affected due to a fault on a transmission line near Dominion’s Suffolk substation on Kings Fork Road, Penn said.
Debbie George, spokeswoman for the City of Suffolk, reported that Suffolk emergency communications was inundated with calls for burglar alarms, traffic light outages and power customers reporting lost service.
Suffolk Public Schools reported losing power at several of its buildings for about 30 minutes between 8:55 a.m. and 9:25 a.m., according to spokeswoman Bethanne Bradshaw.
The buildings affected included Elephant’s Fork, Hillpoint, Kilby Shores, Mount Zion and Robertson elementary schools, Forest Glen and King’s Fork middle schools, King’s Fork and Lakeland high schools, Turlington Woods School, the Pruden Center for Industry and Technology, and the food services and transportation departments.
While the outage did affect a number of businesses, the short duration of the outage did not appear to have too much impact on sales.
“We were only down for about 30 minutes, so it didn’t really affect us too bad,” North Main Street McDonald’s store manager Devonne Hill said. “We had to stop cooking, but we weren’t busy at the time and didn’t have a lot of customers. We made sure everyone who had already ordered got their order and were able to get back up and going pretty quickly after the power came back on.”