Power Protection FEATURED ARTICLE

A normal Friday morning quickly turned chaotic for residents in Clark and Montgomery Counties in Ohio, when separate incidents left more than 12,000 customers shortly after 8:00am.  Fortunately, utility companies Dayton Power & Light and Ohio Edison were able to quickly identify and repair the issues.

In Montgomery County, where the majority of the impacted customers were, the outage was caused by a failed transmission line in a local substation.  Within an hour, three-quarters of them had power back and a half hour later, only about 43 DP&L customers were still waiting. 

Nearly all customers had power restored by 2:00pm, though Ohio Edison faced a slightly more challenging problem that took longer to fix.  Still, while businesses and residences were back to normal fairly quickly, the weekend came early for Greenon Local School District students, which dismissed them as quickly as possible due to the lack of power in some of its schools.  That included having to postpone a 6^th grade field trip and Veterans Day events.

In this case, the cause of the outage was a bird flying into a substation and causing a transformer to blow up and set off a round of Veterans Day weekend fireworks.

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Naturally, social media was rife with entertaining comments, but one follower pointed our succinctly:

While that is true, the hope is that businesses don’t wait for an outage that put their systems at risk before investing in a power protection system.  Any outage – even a mere power surge – can spike line voltage into equipment, destroying sensitive circuitry and knocking systems and entire businesses offline for extended periods. 

Rather than running the risk of costly equipment damage, businesses can ensure their continuity by installing power protection systems right-sized for their needs, including limited or extended runtime UPS capabilities to provide backup power until systems can be shut down properly – or even for extended operational continuity for critical systems.