ALLENTOWN, Pa. — PPL said damage was sustained to one side of a substation that caught fire Wednesday night, causing thousands in the city to lose power.
“The other side remains operational,” Dana Burns, director of communications, said Thursday morning.
Burns said crews worked through the night and will remain on site to evaluate the equipment and determine both the full extent of the damage and the root cause of the outage.
She said there were no injuries and there is no danger to the public.
Fire in the sky
The sky lit up with streaks of blue, purple and gray as the Allentown Fire Department rushed to the scene around 5:30 p.m. Wednesday.
Approximately 8,450 customers lost power, Burns said, but all customers affected by the outage were restored on or before 6:16 p.m.
Burns said that was a testament to the grid and enhanced reliability.
“The flexibility and innovation for our grid did allow us to reroute that power. It’s related to the investments we’ve made in updating and automating the grid," she said.
Investigation is ongoing
According to the PPL website, substations control and regulate power for distribution, serving as the hubs for local power supply.
The facilities generally feature large circuit breakers, transformers, lightning arrestors and controls for power supply and distribution.
Burns said they don’t believe weather was the root cause of Wednesday’s incident, despite a record day of rainfall for the area, and a new record rainfall for the month of December.
“This issue was different and not weather-related, and we continue to focus on taking actions to restore the substation to normal operations as safely and quickly as possible," Burns said.
