GRAND HAVEN, Mich — The lights went out for some 15,000 customers in Grand Haven Monday afternoon.
The Grand Haven Board of Light & Power said they experienced a system-wide outage.
Engineers and line crews were deployed to fix what the power company said was a transmission-related issue at one of the substations.
“It’s been a really long time since we’ve experienced an outage of this magnitude,” Rob Shelley, general manager said. “The cause was a failure in a protective relay at one of our substations.”
The Board of Light & Power's system interconnects with the regional grid in two locations. The outage happened in the northern interconnection while there was a planned maintenance outage simultaneously being performed on the other transmission feed from the south.
That caused the entire system to lose power, the company said.
“I would like to thank the BLP employees for remaining calm and quickly responding,” Shelley said. “This allowed us to identify the process necessary to rapidly restore power to our customers and the community. We also want to thank Public Safety for quickly responding at traffic intersections to ensure the public remains safe.”
Engineers are now doing a deep dive to find out what caused the transmission issues.
For a time, the Grand Haven Board of Light & Power's website and phone lines were down.
Around 2:45 p.m., the power company said the lights should be back on for all homes and businesses in the area.
Some buildings within Grand Haven Public Schools, like Central High School, Ferry and Voyager Elementary School, and Lakeshore Middle School, were impacted.
Despite the issues with power, the school said it planned for a typical bus and parent pickup schedule.
The Board of Light & Power serves more than 15,000 customers in Grand Haven, Ferrysburg, Grand Haven Township, Spring Lake and Robinson Township.