Power knocked out temporarily during heat wave
JACKSON, Tenn. — If you stepped outside on Monday, you probably wanted to go right back inside due to high temperatures here in the Hub City.
A few Jacksonians shared how they felt heat.
“Generally, I think the weather is fine because it’s summer. We’re out here. It brings us outside and we can play activities like volleyball, like what we were doing,” said Brandon So.
The first official day of summer is June 21. While some Jacksonians are staying indoors, others are basking in the sun while taking a few precautions.
“We’re wearing shorts, and drinking Gatorade, and drinking water, and we’re probably going to play shorter games than usual,” said David Carter.
With temperatures being so high, even some neighborhoods in the Jackson areas lost power.
According to JEA, the outage was caused by a lightning arrester failure, which officials say could have been caused by high stress in the heat.
“We isolated the outage, performed a series of switching operations, and then we started looking for other sources to serve the load from,” said Monte Cooper, Vice President of the Jackson Energy Authority.
Around 9,000 JEA customers were without power. However, it only took crews less than two hours to restore the power.
“You never can tell. It can be a sunny day, it could be directly after a lightning strike. Obviously that wasn’t the case today, but being a hot day and very humid, sometimes that does add to the failure rate of lightning arresters,” Cooper said.
All power was restored by JEA crews around 8 p.m.
You can always check for outages in your neighborhood here.
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