Equipment failure at Hypoluxo substation causes power outage

A piece of equipment failed and sparked a fire late on a Wednesday night at the Hypoluxo substation, causing a widespread power outage in Lake Worth. The city said a similar outage in April followed a transformer malfunction, and that the equipment which failed this time was a replacement which would also be sent for forensic testing. The city said it did not yet have data pointing to a cause. It said the failures affected the city's only incoming supply, after which the city must start its own power plant, a process that takes several hours, and that renewal of the ageing system had been deferred for many years.

The city said renewal of ageing equipment had been deferred, and that the outages affected a single incoming supply. No technical cause had been identified at the time of the report.

1. Maintain and renew substation equipment on a planned schedule rather than deferring work.
2. Provide a second independent supply where a single incoming line can leave customers without power for hours.
3. Track sections of the network with repeated faults and address them before they affect large numbers of customers.

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