Flooding Shuts Power Hubs In Bridgeport, Turning Lights Out On 50,000 Customers

Two  electric substations in Bridgeport  were to be shut down in Bridgeport Monday night, leaving about 52,000 customers in the dark until at least Tuesday morning, because of the unusually high flood waters from Long Island Sound, said Tony Marone, senior vice president for United Illuminating Co.

About 47,000 of the customers served by the two local power hubs – at Congress Street and at Pequonnock Street – were in Bridgeport. The  other 5,000 were spread out among Stratford, Fairfield and Trumbull, he said.

“We had gotten rather lucky with regard to the storm surge for high tide early today, and … we were able to keep the water at bay affecting … our substations. We are not so fortunate at this point in time,” Marone said at Malloy’s 6 p.m. media briefing in the State Armory.

It became clear that the high tide coming around midnight would inundate outdoor equipment with salt water – and, worse, it could get into the buildings that house the sensitive control rooms at the stations, he said. And so the utility needed to begin immediate efforts such as sandbagging, sealing doors, and pumping out water, Marone said.

Such  efforts require that substations be “de-energized” – switched off over a couple of hours, he said. This was done at one of the substations during Tropical Storm Irene in August 2011, he said.  He said that control rooms were kept dry during Irene, and after the water subsided, “we were able to bring that station back in roughly four hours.”

That quick a restoration would be “probably a very best-case scenario” this time around, he said, because the water level has risen higher.  On Tuesday morning, damage will be assessed “and, if things are well, then after that we could begin to start switching those substations back in.” But, he said, “under a worst-case scenario, if water does get into those sophisticated controls, then we’ve got a bigger problem to deal with and it’s difficult to anticipate how long that would be.”