Power restored after transmission failure in Fredericton hits 6,300 customers
NB Power has restored power to nearly 6,300 customers in Fredericton after a transmission failure Monday afternoon.
The power came back on around 2:30 p.m. in the several areas of the city that were affected, said Marie-Andrée Bolduc, spokesperson for NB Power.
Bolduc said a trip in the system at the Mactaquac Generating Station triggered the failure in the transmission lines.
At one point, 15,000 customers were affected, but 8,700 got power back within a few minutes. Power was restored to the remaining customers about an hour and 15 minutes later.
"There were no injuries or safety issues for the public and the system reacted as per its design," Bolduc said.
The outage started at about 1:15 p.m.
Transmission lines affected
Bloduc said both transmission lines and distribution lines are involved in feeding electricity into homes.
"Think of transmission lines as the highway and distribution lines as secondary roads," she said.
Transmission lines are high voltage lines that feed the substations, which then feed the distribution lines. When there is a transmission failure, high numbers of customers affected, she said.
Several areas of the city were affected, including uptown neighbourhoods and the University of New Brunswick, where security alerted students to a campus-wide outage via Twitter. Some Lincoln customers also lost power.
