Thousands of Riviera Utilities customers along Alabama’s Eastern Shore lost electricity for several hours after equipment failures on an Alabama Power transmission system knocked out five substations at once, utility officials said.
The outage began mid-morning when a connector piece on the transmission system, sometimes called a “jumper,” burned apart near the Belforest community, according to Riviera Utilities. Additional lines in the area also went down around the same time. Because the affected substations draw power from that shared transmission system, the failure cascaded quickly, cutting service to a large share of the utility’s customer base.
Riviera Utilities serves roughly 44,000 customers across Baldwin County, and utility officials said about 18,000 of them were without power at the height of the outage. Crews worked to reroute electricity from unaffected substations so that customers could be brought back online in stages rather than waiting for the original transmission problem to be fully resolved.
“We’re going to do some switching and pick the customers up from some other substations,” a Riviera Utilities spokesperson said at the time, adding that crews hoped to have the bulk of customers restored quickly. Within a few hours, power had been returned to essentially all affected homes and businesses.
The outage also disrupted some traffic signals in Daphne and Spanish Fort, creating brief headaches for drivers navigating busy Eastern Shore corridors during the disruption. Local officials urged motorists to treat dark intersections as four-way stops until signals came back online.
Alabama Power, which owns the transmission infrastructure that failed, said the exact cause of the downed lines was still under review. Blustery conditions were moving through coastal Alabama that day, with forecasters calling for wind gusts topping 30 mph, and a company spokesperson said wind could not be ruled out as a contributing factor.
“We experienced a problem with that transmission system earlier today that caused the outage,” the Alabama Power spokesperson said. “There are a lot of factors that could have led to that, wind certainly could have been a factor.”
Widespread outages caused by transmission-level failures, rather than problems within a single local distribution system, are relatively unusual because they can affect multiple substations and communities simultaneously. Baldwin County’s rapid growth along the Eastern Shore in the years since has only increased the number of homes and businesses that rely on that shared infrastructure, underscoring why utilities continue to invest in system redundancy and faster switching capability between substations.
No injuries were reported in connection with the outage or the downed lines.