Around 58K briefly were without power Wednesday morning in Bluffton and on Hilton Head
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A fire at a Santee Cooper power substation in Bluffton early Wednesday morning left around 58,000 households in Beaufort and Jasper counties without electricity.
By 7 a.m., power had been restored for about a third of those initially reporting outages, said Mollie Gore, a spokesperson for Santee Cooper.
At 9 a.m., around 10,000 customers remained without power, and an hour later that number was down to only eight customers.
Tray Hunter, spokesperson for Palmetto Electric, said the outage stemmed from the Santee Cooper substation off Burnt Church Road in Bluffton.
“We are working with (Santee Cooper) trying to reroute power to get as many customers back on as we can,” Hunter said at 6 a.m.
Beaufort County Schools started at their normal times, but parents were advised by the district that buses might run late.
Traffic signals along U.S. 278 from at least S.C. 170 in Okatie all the way onto Hilton Head Island were affected. An advisory from the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office urged drivers to use caution.
At the peak of the outage, Palmetto Electric Cooperative recorded around 54,000 customers without power in Beaufort County and around 4,000 without power in Jasper County.
An equipment failure at the Santee Cooper substation set fire to two small transformers just after 5 a.m. Wednesday, said Stephen Combs, a spokesperson for the Bluffton Township Fire District.
Employees were at the building at the time of the fire, but no injuries were reported, he said.
Combs added that first responder agencies are often inundated with calls during power outages. Questions should be directed to customers’ respective energy providers, he said.
This story was originally published March 29, 2023 at 6:31 AM.
