(Jan. 5, 2017) More than 9,200 Choptank Electric customers lost power for about an hour on Tuesday afternoon because of an equipment malfunction.
Debbie Rementer, key accounts manager for the cooperative, said equipment in a cabinet, not a transformer as reported elsewhere, is responsible for the outage, although the devices look similar from the outside.
The cabinet, located at 800 Ocean Parkway, suffered a malfunction that caused a fire that interrupted service. Rementer said automated safety equipment, also within the cabinet, “did its job” and activated to extinguish the blaze.
According to the cooperative’s website, Choptank serves almost 14,000 customers in Worcester, which means about 65 percent of customers in the county were without power.
The Worcester County Sherriff’s office reported via social media that traffic signals were also affected.
During the major outage, at least two smaller outages were reported in the Berlin area. Rementer said she had no information on these outages, which affected fewer than 100 customers.
Debbie Rementer, key accounts manager for the cooperative, said equipment in a cabinet, not a transformer as reported elsewhere, is responsible for the outage, although the devices look similar from the outside.
The cabinet, located at 800 Ocean Parkway, suffered a malfunction that caused a fire that interrupted service. Rementer said automated safety equipment, also within the cabinet, “did its job” and activated to extinguish the blaze.
According to the cooperative’s website, Choptank serves almost 14,000 customers in Worcester, which means about 65 percent of customers in the county were without power.
The Worcester County Sherriff’s office reported via social media that traffic signals were also affected.
During the major outage, at least two smaller outages were reported in the Berlin area. Rementer said she had no information on these outages, which affected fewer than 100 customers.