FRANKLIN
Frigid temperatures put the chill on several hundred area customers’ homes during Wednesday night.

Jonathan D. Thompson, engineering supervisor and interim vice president of operations at Community Electric, and Daisy Pridgen with Media Relations at Dominion Virginia Power, each confirmed that the high demand for electricity was the reason.

“The cause was system overload on Dominion Virginia Power. We take a feed from them, and that is what caused the outage. When they dropped, they dropped us,” he said.

Teresa Hurst of Carrsville was one of Community Electric’s customers who felt that effect.

She reported that the power at her family’s home went off at 11 p.m. and didn’t fully resume until 6:30 a.m.

“It takes a long time to restore, which must be in stages and that’s time-consuming,” Thompson explained. “We transferred power to another substation feed.”

He does not, however, anticipate any more outages this weekend, as steps have been taken to alleviate demand.

As mentioned, Community Electric feeds from Dominion, which had its own share of outages — 850-plus in Franklin and surroundings. The crews promptly got to work and, like the cooperative, restored power in increments with the final customers getting electricity restored at 7:18 a.m.

“Cause for the outages were related to the cold temperatures,” Pridgen said. “The extreme cold weather has resulted in an increased demand for electricity. Our system is built to respond to increased demand during extreme events like these, but there are times when isolated pieces of equipment, for a variety of reasons, may not be able to perform as expected.

“Dominion, as always, is prepared to respond to any outages and does not expect outages to last for an extended period of time.”

She also offered this advice:

“If a customer does lose power, they can help us with a timely restoration by turning off major appliances and especially their heat pumps until power is restored. Leave one light on so you know when power has been restored, and wait 5-10 minutes before turning appliances and heat pumps back on — this can help the heavy initial load on the system settle down.”

The National Weather Service in Wakefield reports that today will have highs in the mid-40s, lows in the lower 20s and gusts up to 25 mph. It will be sunny on Saturday with highs in the lower 30s and lows around 20. For Sunday, highs will be up in the mid-40s with a 50 percent chance of rain and lows in the upper 30s.