Faulty recloser leaves Houlton area powerless

The failure of a piece of equiptment on the Ludlow Road left the area of Houlton powerless and in the dark for an hour and a half Thursday.
    According to John Clark, the power outage, which lasted as long as two hours in some areas, was caused by a recloser which opened up for reasons unknown to the Water Company. This malfunction caused an outage from the area on the Ludlow Road where the recloser located, through the town and to Hodgdon. The area immediately surrounding Louisiana Pacific in New Limerick was the only local area left with power.
“We thought maybe it had been  caused by a bull-dozer … with some of this construction work that is going on out on Bangor Street, but in hind sight we think it’s this piece of equipment,” explained Clark.
A recloser is an electronic switch. This switch opened up for no apparent reason on Thursday, which made it so difficult for the Water Company to find the problem.
“When a switch like that opens up it’s usually for a reason. So what you have to do is inspect your lines to make sure nothing is wrong. They did that, which took quite some time. They didn’t find anything so they tried to close the switch again and it went in for a while but it wouldn’t stay,” said Clark.
The Water Company is still investigating the incident to find out for sure what the issue was which caused the recloser to fail. The Water Company has also downloaded new software in order to prevent a situation like this from happening again in the future.
“We’ve taken that equipment out of service and we’ve by-passed it. We’ll be either repairing it or installing a new recloser,” concluded Clark.