Tens of thousands of Met-Ed customers in Northampton County lost power Sunday afternoon due to a problem at a Palmer Township substation.
Met-Ed spokesperson Todd Meyers said about 34,000 customers lost power around 4 p.m. The website said about 25,000 were still without power around 7 p.m., but Meyers said the number was likely much less. While the website is usually accurate, he said, in cases of large outages like this, it can be slow to update with restorations.
“We also are always working to get those customers back on as quickly as we can,” he said.
Meyers said crews were working to restore power using both remote switches and with linemen going to poles to work manual switches to detour power from other lines. He said 95% of those who lost power were expected to have it restored by 8 p.m. Sunday.
“If you think about these substations and lines like a road network, you’d have to do a detour,” he said. “You can feed customers from an alternate source, but when you have this many customers … that can take some time.”
He said the utility must be careful when it reroutes power because if too many customers use electricity from the same line, it could fail, causing more outages.
The problem started at the large substation, which provides the electrical supply to four or five substations in the region, each of which in turn has lines that go out to feed customers, Meyers said.
“That’s how you get a large outage like this, vs. a car into a pole or a tree down,” Meyers said.
Meyers said it wasn’t certain what exactly caused the outage at the substation. He said engineers and others are looking into it.
“Sometimes there can be some kind of electric fault,” he said. “We may not know what it is today.
“It killed off all the electricity that normally goes out from that substation to feed this network. The entire substation is down.”
