Outages last nearly 4 1/2 hours

Published 8:33 pm Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Clanton residents that lost power Tuesday night as a result of a damaged telephone pole had to wait nearly four and a half hours to get their power restored.

Jan Ellis, spokesperson for Alabama Power, said the first call notifying the company of the outages came in about 5:55 p.m.

She said the outages lasted about 268 minutes, just under four and a half hours.

“The crews had to take all the wire off the existing pole that was there, reset the (new) pole and restring the wire,” Ellis said.

One Clanton crew and two Selma crews worked to replace the pole, which stood at the intersection of Seventh Street and Fourth Avenue North in Clanton. The pole was damaged when it was struck by a log truck that was apparently turning south onto Seventh Street.

Overall, 1,639 customers were affected by the outages.

Ellis indicated that the location of the crash was the main reason for the wait, though the power was restored earlier than anticipated.

“There was no way to reroute power to any of our customers because of the location of the pole,” she explained.