A sharp-shooting vandal may be to blame for shutting off power to virtually all residents of Sulphur Springs and at least three other nearby cities this morning.
City Manager Marc Maxwell and city workers were at Cooper Lake this morning installing a generator after the power outage occurred around 7 a.m.
“It was a transmission line, the line that feeds the pumps at Cooper Lake pump station,” Maxwell said. “It appears that someone shot one of the phases out. One of the lines is frayed in half and laying on the ground, and it looks like it was shot. We’ll probably never know just who it was.”
Stan McKee, area manager for Oncor, said the company was investigating the cause of the failure of the 138 kilovolt transmission line. While the first patrolman who found the break indicated it appeared to have been shot, the electrical distribution company officials are waiting to find out the cause for certain.
“It was frayed, and the way those lines kind of came loose — if they came loose — that wasn’t consistent with any normal thing that might happen,” McKee said. “But we’re not going to say that [the line was shot] right off the bat. That portion will be sent back to the manufacturer, and engineers will have to take a look at that line and then a determination will be made if that was damaged in that way.”
The line provides power to a large portion of the city of Sulphur Springs, as well as Commerce, Cooper and parts of Paris.
“It was a fairly large area,” McKee said. “Our system dispatchers were able to isolate that outage pretty quickly and provide feeds out of alternative substations to those areas, so the outage only lasted maybe 10 to 15 minutes.”
Maxwell said Oncor was able to redirect the source of electricity to Sulphur Springs in a matter or minutes.
“It’s pretty amazing if you think about it,” the city manager said. “They can reroute an entire transmission line in a minute, minute and a half.”
McKee said the necessary repairs were being made this morning and were expected to be completed by 2 p.m. today.
“The only thing we were not able to pick up was the Cooper Lake water pump,” McKee said, adding that both the city of Sulphur Springs and the North Texas Municipal Water District, which pump water from the lake, were informed of the outage.
Maxwell said the generators were only being taken to the pump station as a precaution and that there shouldn’t be any interruption of water service to the city.
“We’ve got enough storage in the water towers, and we have some wet wells out at the water plant to last until 3 or 4 o’clock today,” he said. “But just to be sure, we’re taking the generator out there.”
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