Clay Electric moves toward midweek power-up goal

Three Rivers grid may be rebuilt by Thursday night.

  • Power crews from Titan Powerline of Duncan, Okla., work to install a new power pole and transformer where the old one snapped and exploded during Hurricane Helene on Southwest Castle Heights Terrace near Southwest Main Boulevard in Lake City Sunday afternoon. A foreman with Titan said the company does daily work in Oklahoma and Texas, but contracts with FPL for storm recovery. Titan Powerline sent three full crews, or 20 workers, to Lake City to help restore power. (TODD WILSON/Lake City Reporter)
    Power crews from Titan Powerline of Duncan, Okla., work to install a new power pole and transformer where the old one snapped and exploded during Hurricane Helene on Southwest Castle Heights Terrace near Southwest Main Boulevard in Lake City Sunday afternoon. A foreman with Titan said the company does daily work in Oklahoma and Texas, but contracts with FPL for storm recovery. Titan Powerline sent three full crews, or 20 workers, to Lake City to help restore power. (TODD WILSON/Lake City Reporter)
  • Jon Little, communications director, Suwannee Valley Electric Cooperative, provided an update on the cooperative's restoration efforts to Columbia County Commissioners during a special meeting Sunday afternoon. (TODD WILSON/Lake City Reporter)
    Jon Little, communications director, Suwannee Valley Electric Cooperative, provided an update on the cooperative's restoration efforts to Columbia County Commissioners during a special meeting Sunday afternoon. (TODD WILSON/Lake City Reporter)

    Clay Electric is quickly gaining ground on the areas where its customers are in the dark and needing power restored and the company hopes to have its customer base almost all restored by the end of day Tuesday, officials said.

    “We have about 500 contractors working in Columbia County and currently have 11,200 customers out, but we think we can have 95% in Columbia restored by Tuesday night, but these don’t include the Three Rivers area,” said Troy Adams, a Clay Electric spokesperson.

    Adams was one of several representatives from electric companies serving Columbia County who spoke at the county’s Hurricane Helene emergency operations center briefing Sunday afternoon.

    Adams said the massive damage in the Three Rivers area south of Fort White on the south side of U.S. Highway 27 would require many new power poles and new transformers to be installed.

    “We’re staging these things in there, the poles and transformers, so they are there to work with,” Adams said. “We hope to have them completed and back up by Wednesday or Thursday night.”

    Adams said Duke Energy was able to complete the work and energize Clay Electric’s Branford substation on Saturday evening and that was allowing Clay Electric crews to move faster in restoring power to some 5,000 customers it serves from that facility in southern Columbia County. He said the station near Westside Elementary School in Lake City also was functional and was enabling crews to help restore power to the Troy Road area west and southwest of the school.

    Jon Little, communications director for Suwannee Valley Electric Cooperative, attended the meeting and gave an update on the 2,000 customers SVEC services in Columbia County, mostly in the north end of the county. Little said as of Sunday afternoon, about 50% of those were still in the dark, but FPL had just released about 1,500 Pike Electric crew members to help with SVEC customer restoration efforts.

    With the additional crews in place, he thought power restoration for customers would happen quickly, possibly on the same schedule as Clay Electric of having most of the SVEC customers back with power by Wednesday or Thursday.

    “We’re hopeful,” Little said. “It’s a fluid situation and we don’t want to give out information that is unreliable.”

    A Duke Energy spokesman in attendance said his company’s 620 customers in the Fort White area in the southern end of Columbia County should all have their power restored by midnight Sunday.

    Florida Power and Light’s spokesman held the line with the same statement made on Saturday that 95% of their more than 14,000 customers in Columbia County would have power restored by day-end Monday, if not sooner.