By Mindy Ragan Wood
Staff Writer
When it rains technical problems in Piedmont, it pours.
Last week a massive AT&T outage left the city government without services and yesterday 1,600 OG&E customers were without power.
High winds ripped through 25 poles from Northwest Highway along Piedmont Road to Williams Grocery.
While AT&T’s service reliability remains to be seen, an OG&E spokeswoman said the lay of the land contributed to Wednesday’s outage.
“Those straight-line winds came through and there’s no buildings, no buffer so it just took them out like a domino effect,” OG&E’s Jackie Geiger said.
By 2 p.m. Wednesday nearly every customer’s power was restored. One customer was supposed to have power restored by 8 p.m.
The storm did more than take down the might of utility poles. A storage building was rolled over a fence, patio furniture was displaced, a stop sign was bent in half and whole segments of fence in a neighborhood were missing. City government offices were not without power. Recent discussions on the Piedmont Rants and Raves page suggested underground lines, but those have their own problems.
A report by the Energy Information Agency shows underground lines make up 18 percent of all power lines. The cost is five to 10 times the price of above ground and it takes about 60 percent longer to fix outages because they are under ground. Buried lines are susceptible to flooding and can still fail due to lightning or equipment outages.
