BENTONVILLE — Power surges on utility lines leading to the Benton County Courthouse and Administration Building knocked some systems offline over the weekend, but a surge protector prevented more serious damage.
The problem was first reported Saturday when employees of the Prosecutor's Office went to work, according to Sidney Reynolds, county director of information technology.
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Members of Carroll Electric Cooperative Corp. can check their power status or report power outages through the corporation’s website at www.carrollecc.com.
Source: Staff Report
“We believe it happened Saturday around 2 or 3 a.m.as far as we can tell,” Reynolds said. “It took down the Internet and the phone system in the courts building.”
John Sudduth, county general services administrator, said the surge also shut down the heating and cooling system in the building, but caused no damage.
“In the courthouse tower the heating and cooling was off in all of the fourth floor offices,” Sudduth said. “All that had to be reset to bring it back on line. But there was no mechanical damage.”
A power surge also hit the county Administration Building but was blocked from doing serious damage by a relatively inexpensive surge protector, Reynolds said.
“It’s about a $250 surge protector that burned out,” Reynolds said. “We didn’t lose any data. We had a tech go in over the weekend to get everything up and running. Something just came in over the lines, that’s about all we know. The surge protector did what it’s supposed to do. The system it’s protecting is about a $25,000 or $30,000 system.”
The county had a similar experience in the fall when a surge came through utility lines and burned a main distribution panel in the Administration Building, Sudduth said. Other smaller incidents also have been reported, he said. The county is going to ask the city for help in tracking the incidents to try to determine the cause and come up with a possible solution, Sudduth said.
“Nobody even knows what causes it at this point,” Sudduth said. “The grid in downtown Bentonville seems to have some issues with surges coming through the lines. It seems to happen almost weekly.”
Bentonville residents experienced two power outages Saturday night and early Sunday morning. The first incident occurred when a feeder line from Swepco “blinked” and caused two Bentonville substations to lock out at about 7:40 p.m., said Travis Matlock, engineering director for Bentonville. City electric workers isolated the problem and restored power about 8:30 p.m., Matlock said. The outage affected about 3,400 people around downtown Bentonville.
A lightning strike knocked power out to about 2,700 people in the northwest part of town. The brief outage occurred early Sunday while most people were asleep, he said.
Carroll Electric Cooperative Corporation reported power outages through central and eastern Benton County and neighboring areas in Carroll and Madison counties from Saturday through Monday. According to Nancy Plagge, Carroll Electric’s communications director, there were about 109 customers without power Saturday. The period of power loss ranged from 40 minutes to about five hours. Most reports came from the Hiwasse-Bella Vista area, Plagge said. On Sunday, she said, there were about 10 scattered reports of power outages in Benton County, but that number jumped to 420 Monday. Most of the problems were attributed to lightning strikes. Power outages on Monday lasted from 30 minutes to 3 1/2 hours, Plagge said.
“We’re in pretty good shape right now,” Plagge said Monday afternoon. “Subject to the weather, of course.”
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Misty Gittings contributed to this report.