News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
Tuesday morning storms had Cookeville’s Electric Department dealing with an outage in the South Willow Avenue area.
Director Carl Haney said that the outage was the result of what they suspect to be a lightning strike to a circuit breaker.
“Typically it can cause damage from cracking some insulators to something like this to where it actually caused some immediate damage where we lost the circuit breaker,” Haney said. “A lot of times we might find this later on.”
Haney said that this kind of situation is not uncommon.
“Obviously lightning tries to get to these past the ground,” Haney said. “All of our poles, they do have ground wires and ground rods on them, so sometimes it happens.”
Haney said that that circuit breaker affects some 1,200 people. Haney said that the outage first occurred around 8:30 a.m. and lasted for some 45 minutes.
Haney said that he does not foresee any lasting effects from this issue.
