About 8,500 Starkville residents experienced a 32-minute power outage this morning after a transformer mistakenly detected high temperatures and switched off in self-defense, utilities general manager Terry Kemp said.
The incident happened at the primary Starkville Utilities substation near the interchange of Highways 12 and 182. The areas near City Hall, The Mill at MSU and the industrial buildings on the west side of the city were unaffected, Kemp said.
Workers restored power at 6:20 a.m., and the problem is not expected to happen again, he said.
“The system read a possible high temperature, which triggers other actions to occur up to isolation mode, (but) it did not actually have a high temperature,” Kemp said.
The utilities department already had plans to install new external monitors on the transformers at that particular substation in the next few days, and the new equipment should ensure accurate temperature monitoring, he said.
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