Guilford County’s operations at its large Maple Street building – where the Department of Health and Human Services is located – is critical to Guilford County government.
It’s usually packed with people who are seeking food and nutrition benefits or are there for health screenings or for other county services.
On Monday June 6, those operations had to come to a screeching halt because of a bad automobile accident that took out the power.
It’s bad enough when a home losses power, but it’s a major event when a central nerve system of county government is taken out.
According to Guilford County Communications and Public Relations Director Julie Smith, the accident closed down the building at about 2:30 p.m. for about two and a half hours. She said it was her understanding that a vehicle had taken town power poles and she was correct about that.
Jeff Brooks, a spokesperson for Duke Energy provided a detailed explanation.
“Yesterday’s accident was the result of a vehicle taking down multiple utility poles along North Church Street,” he stated in an email. “The accident brought down three poles, power lines and other equipment, all of which had to be replaced and the damaged equipment removed. The outage affected around 3,500 customers in the area throughout the afternoon. We were able to restore nearly 3,000 of those customers by early evening and the remainder were restored by shortly after midnight. Cars and trucks hitting utility poles is an ongoing challenge for utilities as it is impossible to know where or when an accident will occur.”
Brooks added that Duke Energy is working to combat these challenges by making power grid improvements locally as well as across the state. Those improvement projects include pole and line upgrades as well as the installation of “smart, self-healing technology.” That is, technology that can automatically detect an outage and very quickly reroute the power flow to restore service faster.
“Self-healing technology can reduce the impacts of an outage by as much as 75 percent and can often restore power to customers in less than a minute,” Brooks noted.
He added, “We are deploying this technology now, which helped avoid nearly 35,000 customer outages in Guilford and Forsyth Counties in 2022, saving customers nearly 200,000 hours of total outage time. We hope to serve around 80 percent of customers with this smart technology over the next few years.”
DSS and Public Health operations were back up and running on Tuesday, June 7, but it is unfortunate that the outage happened at Maple Street because many clients who use the services there don’t have good access to transportation.
During this power outage, around 3 PM traffic signals were inoperative at Battleground Avenue and Pisgah Church Road, Pisgah Church Road and Martinsville Road, Pisgah Church Road and Lawndale Avenue, Lawndale Avenue across from Fresh Market and Lawndale Avenue at Lake Jeannette Road. I was amazed at the response of the Greensboro Police Department, there was one patrol car with one officer at Lawndale and Pisgah Church Road.
The Greensboro City Council and the City Manager are totally incompetent. They pursue funding for the Tanger Center, the Civil Rights Museum, the Greensboro Coliseum, Parks & Recreation Department, free trolleys for downtown Greensboro and numerous other items less important than public safety while generating an impotent police department. They have cut off the much needed revenue to properly pay officers and provide proper equipment.
The voting citizens in the City of Greensboro should seek out legal advice on how to immediately remove these asinine council members and manager.
Thoughts I randomly think when the power and cable are out –
1. Why don’t major government buildings have generators like Emergency Services does? (ones that don’t need sprinklers on the roof to cool them?)
2. Why haven’t Duke and Spectrum used money from price hikes to begin to place lines underground instead of chopping down trees every year, while doing major storm repair, in new developments and shopping expansion, blah, blah, blah?
3. Why do people get so upset about outages still? We’ve only had electricity for about 100 years and it looks like it’s on its way out. Adjust kids.