‘Unfortunate coincidence:’ Three major Beaches Energy outages in three days

JACKSONVILLE BEACH, Fla. — Three major power outages in 48 hours at the beaches left thousands in the dark for hours at a time for some. It comes as many are cranking the air conditioning with intense heat forecasted by the First Alert Weather Team.

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“I went from it being really hot at work to coming back and it was really hot at the house. It was like ugh. It’s not the end of the world though,” Tiziana Ciabatta, a new Jax Beach resident, said. She was one of thousands impacted by the outages.

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Beaches Energy said it’s an “unfortunate coincidence”, but not related to the heat. Tuesday’s outage came as crews were working on Jacksonville Drive on a project to move overhead powerlines underground. A representative said a piece broke and fell into the other lines causing a circuit outage.

“Once crews were clear and the issue cleared, the circuit was restored,” a representative said.

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On Sunday, 3,198 Ponte Vedra Beach customers lost power for more than two hours. On Monday night, 1,800 North Jax Beach customers were in the dark for about an hour and a half. On Tuesday, 2,602 South Jax Beach customers were impacted by a short outage of 8 minutes.

A representative said Monday’s outage happened after a part in the “padmount switch” failed. “The root cause analysis is still being conducted as to why it failed, and it will take some time because our Beaches Energy team needs to work through it with the vendor.”

Beaches Energy said none of the three outages were related to the heat and the utility typically doesn’t use more than half of its capacity. Because each circuit is never loaded with more than half its capacity, another circuit could typically take on the extra load even during peak hours a representative explained.

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