Nearly 7,000 people near the coast lost power Wednesday after an equipment failure at substation 115 knocked out electricity for Santee Cooper customers in Myrtle Beach.
It was the latest of at least five outages in the area in the past month so News13 reached out to local utility companies to find out why it seems the power has gone out more often recently.
Representatives from both the Horry Electric Cooperative and Santee Cooper say there are a variety of reasons for outages, they’ve just been struck by all of them over a short period of time.
More than 32,000 customers have been affected by power outages in Horry County since mid-September, a number which surprised viewers on our Facebook page.
Lisa commented:
“what exactly is wrong with the power in that area? its not normal or common to lose power so often”
While Diane added:
“at least once a week with Santee Cooper. better shape up!!!!”
Even Myrtle Beach police noticed a seeming uptick in outages, “over the past couple of months we’ve had a solid increase in being deployed to power outages a various red lights,” said Lt. Joey Crosby.
Crosby says the biggest cause for concern is traffic lights going out at busy intersections, “when we have instances such as this, we’ll have officers that are assigned to their daily duties and other functions.”
With all the attention given outages, News13 sat down with Santee Cooper for an explanation.
“We have actually not seen not seen a larger number of outages however the outages we have had in the past month to month and a half have affected larger numbers of customers,” said spokesperson Susan Mungo.
Mungo adds that can have an impact on people’s perceptions, “if your powers been off 3 times in one month that seems like outages are happening more often,” and it’s something Santee Cooper takes very seriously.
“Each outage we look into what caused it and what we can do to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” said Mungo.
The company will add two new power lines running from Bucksport to Garden City and Mungo says that will help increase the reliability of the system which should cut down on the amount of time it takes to get the power back on in future outages.
“It gives us another way to feed your neighborhood with electricity so if something happens on one line we can transfer the load to another,” she said.
Outages due to storms or falling limbs are practically impossible to predict and in 2014 Santee Cooper was ranked first out of 44 utility companies for reliability.
