Small Animals or Birds
Outages occur when animals, especially squirrels and raccoons, climb on transformers or fuses and cause a short circuit.
Trees
Trees falling on power lines or tree limbs coming into contact with power lines are frequent causes of power outages and "blinking lights" even in good weather. Holmes-Wayne Electric works to maintain right-of-way clearances using contracted tree trimmers.
Vehicle Accidents
Vehicles coming into contact with utility poles are another common cause of power outages.
Lightning
Poles, wires, transformers and other electrical equipment are easy targets for lightning strikes, causing severe damage and loss of power. Lightning may also strike trees, causing limbs or large trees to fall onto power lines.
Wind
Wind may cause power lines to swing together or limbs/trees to blow into lines resulting in a fault or a short circuit that interrupts services.
Ice
Weight of ice can cause broken lines or poles. One inch of ice on an electric line between poles (one span) weighs up to a half ton or 1,250 pounds. If equipment is covered in ice, slight winds can cause poles and lines to come down. Also, heavy ice can bring large trees outside of the right-of-way down onto lines creating outages and damaging infrastructure.
Equipment Failure
Equipment Failure
Although Holmes-Wayne Electric inspects and monitors equipment throughout our service area, transformers, aging underground power lines and other electric system equipment sometimes fail. This happens more frequently when the temperature is very cold and very hot.
Power Supply Outage
We depend on American Electric Power (AEP) and First Energy Transmission lines to deliver the electricity from our generating plant to our substations. When they have an outage on their transmission lines, many co-op members are affected as well. In some cases, we are able to transfer power from another substation to restore power for many of those members and reduce the time of the outage while the transmission supplier fixes the problem.
Digging
