Tega Cay electric cables showing age

TEGA CAY, SOUTH CAROLINA - The electric cables in Tega Cay are older than the city itself, and their age is showing.

With some of the cables more than 30 years old, the age, faulty equipment and location have led to unusually frequent cable failures and two citywide power outages in the past two months, Duke Energy officials said. The citywide outages affected nearly 2,000 households, more than half the city's population.

But Duke officials assure the city they're working to prevent such problems in the future. The company is working to immediately fix the sections of cable that have failed more than once, said Joel Lunsford, Duke Energy construction and maintenance supervisor for Tega Cay.

In July, after engineering studies are complete, the company will begin fixing "the better part of a mile's worth of cable," Lunsford said. He said he expects the short-term fix to be complete by Labor Day.

Some of the cables are 32 years old, Lunsford said, and the average life expectancy of an underground electric cable is 30 years. The cables are located 12 to 15 feet underground, which poses an additional problem for company crews, because modern cables are normally set at much shallower levels on average, he said.

All of the older cables need to be replaced to fix the problem permanently. But that's a project that will take six months of planning and two to three years of redesign and recabling time, Lunsford said. The company will start that project in 2007.

Mayor Bob Runde said the plan is a good one. He lived in Tega Cay in 1971, when the current cables were in their heyday. Tega Cay was incorporated in 1982.

"As long as they stick to their plan, I think we'll be in good shape," Runde said.

But age is only part of the problem.

Lunsford said the city had six failures in the last six weeks, which he called "unusually high." In two of those failures -- April 21 and May 21 -- the failures took the whole substation out because of equipment that failed to section off damage.

Resident Martin Miller recalls the recent outages well.

Miller, a longtime fish owner, owns an aquarium with 15 fish that can't live without electricity for more than three hours. But the power was out in his house for seven hours on May 21, he said.

He managed to work with a neighbor, also a fish owner, to get a generator for their tanks that night, but he is worried about future outages.

"It's not going to be easy," Lunsford said, referring to the long- term fix. "There's not a whole lot of shoulder on that road."

Lunsford doesn't anticipate any power outages while work is being done on cables, but he did say yards may be dug up in the future.