HANCOCK, Maine — The power was knocked out Sunday morning in much of Ellsworth’s business district, possibly because of an explosion at a Bangor Hydro substation just over the town line in Hancock.
A large swath of town went dark around 11:30 a.m. Sunday. By 12:30 p.m., power was back on.
Bangor Hydro spokesman Bob Potts said it was a short outage, but a large one, knocking out power in Ellsworth and several surrounding communities. He estimates that more than 8,000 customers were without power.
“That’s a good size outage,” Potts said. “A lot of power comes off that substation.”
On High Street in Ellsworth, traffic became congested while traffic signals went dark for about an hour. The blackout seemed to be centered along High Street, Beckwith Hill and Downeast Highway, where many of Ellsworth’s shops, restaurants, supermarkets and other businesses are located.
One woman said she saw an explosion at the substation Sunday morning.
“My ears are still ringing,” said Mary Ellen Crabtree, an employee at Simons Hancock Farms, located on Downeast Highway across the street from the substation.
“I was standing by the mums and it sounded like firecrackers,” she said. “I saw a big white light, a huge explosion and then a sound like a cannon.”
Technicians from Bangor Hydro arrived at the substation around noon and power was restored to all affected areas around 12:30.
Potts couldn’t say whether the substation malfunction was caused by an explosion, but said it was easy to repair either way.
“It was an equipment malfunction, but a relatively easy fix,” Potts said. “We were able to restore power very quickly, which is a good scenario.”
Follow Mario Moretto on Twitter at @riocarmine.
Bangor hydro website states there are still 6800 people without power in the area, crazy I wonder what caused the substation explosion? Weird
Probably terrorists.
Or a squirrel zigging when he should’ve zagged.
Often after a long period of wet weather, older transformers will expire. Here in Maine where we get extreme hot/cold/wet, equipment does not last as long as it might in say, Virginia.
Perhaps there was some pruning work missed, likley some Bushes fault.
Most likely but not sure, The distribution load is getting close to the max. wattage rating of the sub station and high surges are pushing the transformer arrays past their specs.
Town growth that adds to the load grid without station upgrade will eventually do this. Hydro engineers are 100 per cent n the know and will correct for it if this is the issue. Solar Flares can also cause this. Not sure of the probability in this case.
Do wind turbines explode ??
wind turbines feed power to transformers that do explode dum dum. Power does not come from a windmill directly to the lines!!!!!!
Thanks for answering my simple question so thoughtfully.
I saw a video where a wind turbine caught fire and flew to pieces.
Not sure if it ” exploded” or not , though.
You sure are a big help.
Have a nice day.
After a fashion, yes. Any machine with moving parts can suffer a catastrophic structural failure if its design limits are exceeded (or there’s some defect in its materials or construction that unexpectedly reduces those limits). In the case of a rotating system like a wind turbine, that will tend to involve pieces flying violently outward – not an explosion in the “rapid expansion of gases” sense (unlike a chemical or steam explosion), but explodey enough for most people’s taste.
Mind you, you’d have to get a wind turbine turning pretty darn fast for a properly built one to fail in that way, but theoretically, yes, it can happen.
This is now the second time that a transformer has had problems there. I wonder why they didnt fix it the first time. 1994? was when the other transformer blew once before?
This has been a recurring problem this year. Time BH fixed the issue and invested in a permanent fix. Tough to be without power in the busy time of the year.