Submitted by Suanne Z. Thamm
Reporter – News Analyst
For the second Sunday in a row, Historic District residents and business owners lost power for several hours. According to a Florida Public Utilities (FPU) spokesperson, the events were unrelated. The first outage on October 29th was caused by a traffic accident. The one on November 6th was of a more complicated origin, related to Hurricane Matthew.
Aleida Socarras, FPU’s AVP for Marketing and Energy Logistics, told the Fernandina Observer, “We had two distinct problems this Sunday afternoon. One involved the top of a wood switch pole on South Fletcher that broke off and disabled one of our distribution feeders. The other problem was a failed arrestor and insulator on different poles that impacted the distribution feeder for the Downtown area. After Hurricane Matthew, we did an infrared inspection of our system and it did not identify the damaged pole, insulator or arrestor that caused the problems. We have been systematically inspecting the system and hopefully we will be able to spot any remaining damaged equipment before we have another problem. We regret the inconvenience these outages have caused. It is not the type of service our customers expect and that we want to provide. We will continue our inspections and to continuously patrol the system to try to spot any issues before they happen.”
Ramiro “R.J.” Sicre, FPU’s Government Relations Manager, said that the outage did not reflect a problem with the 8 Flags Energy plant recently dedicated as a joint venture with Rayonier Advanced Materials. Sicre said that energy from the new plant is being used as anticipated, but when there is a break in a transmission point line or point, power goes down. He likened it to throwing a circuit breaker at your home electric panel. Sicre also acknowledged problems with the FPU emergency telephone line. “We are working on that,” he said.
Unfortunately for local restaurants, the power outage came at a time when Centre Street was full of visitors seeking a place to enjoy Sunday brunch or lunch. Sicre said that he has tried to contact the restaurants with an apology. “This is not something we expect to see as a regular occurrence,” he said. “We apologize to our customers and visitors.”
Sicre said that FPU has already been in contact with the Nassau County Supervisor of Elections Office to reassure them that power will not be a problem in the FPU service area on Election Day.
Maybe they should focus on their 800 number too! We tried calling for 2 hours and never spoke to a rep or were able to leave a message. They make Comcast customer service look like professionals.
This kind of outage was routine when we move here in 1998. Electric service has been much, much improved since then.
It was a major concern that no one answered the phone. (I hung up after being on hold for 8 minutes.) I hope that no one with medical issues was adversely affected. I didn’t call FPU for an extended chat, just some basic information. A recorded message would have likely answered my questions.