Power is restored to nearly 42,000 customers in Clay County on Monday morning

The power is back on Monday morning for more than 42,000 customers in Clay County.

That’s after outages affected homes and business throughout Orange Park, Middleburg, Fleming Island and Oak Leaf.

Vincent Myers lives with his family in Orange Park and when he woke up he says the first thing he noticed was what time it was.

“I saw the 12 o’clock was flashing up on the stove,” Myers said.

The Clay County Sheriff’s Office sent also sent tweets telling people to be safe in the dark and treat traffic intersections as four-way stops if the lights aren’t working.

Clay Electric says the problem happen around 5:30 a.m. at a electricity substation in the Black Creek area. They said it needed to be manually reset.

The company says that could happened when a circuit breaker opens.

One cause could be a current overload.

They say because this was also a transmission substation, Seminole Electric, which is clay electric’s power provider also investigated.

Clay Electric tells us the power was restored about an hour later.

“The power was on, we continued our morning with the kids getting on to school and I’m off to work,” said Myers.

The Clay County School District tweeted too, making sure everyone knew schools were open as usual.

When it comes to power outages, Myers says his family is always prepared.

“We always carry flashlights with DD batteries, you know, ready to go for anything you know?” Myers said.

Clay Electric says they are investigating what caused the problem. They say more people than usual were impacted in this power outage because the Black Creek Substation serves a lot of customers.