EPB outage map at 12:12 a.m. on August 10.Areas affected:
* Downtown * Rossville * Fort Oglethorpe * East Ridge * Lookout Mountain * Chattanooga Valley * Ridgedale * Main Street * South Broad Street
Don Nanney looks at one of the terminals at an operator work station Thursday in the control room at the Electric Power Board on Oak Street. The lighted grin displays a distribution feeder from the Apison substation in east Hamilton County.More than 2,500 homes lost power Monday around 11 p.m. after a substation in Fort Oglethorpe failed.
At 12:15 a.m. on Tuesday, the utility's outage map showed that close to 3,000 were still without power, but the utility's Twitter account reported that most affected customers had power restored by 12:25 a.m. By 2:30 a.m. the EPB website reported that all districts had fewer than 100 outages.
With no storm predicted, the sudden loss of power came as a shock. The electricity began to surge repeatedly for some customers, lights began to blink, and then entire neighborhoods were thrown into darkness, leaving only the sound of crickets and wailing emergency sirens.
Several readers reported seeing bright flashes across the skyline and hearing loud sounds as the power surged on and off. EPB spokesman John Pless could not confirm the cause of the flashes.
"All hands are on deck trying to reroute power back to people," said Pless. "Everybody's kind of in rush mode right now."
Pless said crews were investigating two problems on a 46-kilovolt circuit, but that it "will take some time for them and smart grid data to pinpoint what happened."
Residents described loud booms, buzzing and other noises as bright blue, green and orange lights lit up the sky, then went dark, then surged back to life. The power surge set off alarms in some areas.
"The images from the sky tonight were terrifying," said resident Carrie Saynes. "Scared my whole family."
Jordan Connatser stepped outside to watch the light show between surges.
"I watched the houses' lights on the mountain go off and then the whole sky lit up white and then green and continued to glow green for about 10 seconds," Connatster said.
Another reader reported that they were driving down Mountain Creek Road and were able to see flashes and hear buzzing noises from inside the car, and yet another reported hearing a sound like "really loud microphone feedback" from inside their home.
Some residents depend on electricity for medical purposes. Charlotte Sadler, who lives in Missouri, worried that her father in Chattanooga would not be able to breathe amid the prolonged outage.
"He needs a machine to breathe when he sleeps," Sadler said.
The number of affected homes could be significantly higher than 2,500, however EPB only identifies districts in which more than 500 customers have lost power on its outage map at epb.net/outages.
The utility called in additional crews to help restore power, and rerouted power using remote switching technology.
According to EPB's online map, the outages were primarily concentrated in the south of EPB's service area, such as Rossville, Fort Oglethorpe, East Ridge and Lookout Mountain, with hundreds more out in the Chattanooga Valley, Ridgedale and downtown areas.