By Zac Anderson and Anna Scott
Sarasota Herald Tribune
Copyright 2008 Sarasota Herald Tribune
MIAMI — A fire Tuesday at a Florida Power & Light substation in Miami-Dade County shut down two nuclear reactors and set off a chain reaction that ultimately caused nearly one million homes and businesses in the state, including about 50,000 FPL customers in Southwest Florida, to lose power.
Officials late Tuesday were still trying to determine what caused the fire shortly after 1 p.m. at the Flagami substation in west Miami-Dade County.
When the substation went down, it tripped automatic safety systems at the nearby Turkey Point power plant that shut down the plant’s two nuclear reactors.
Turkey Point, located about 25 miles south of Miami, powers about 450,000 homes. But all of FPL’s energy is fed into a larger grid system, and to compensate for this massive power loss the grid instantly reduced service to communities throughout the state.
The blackout knocked out power to 700,000 to 800,000 electric customers in the state, FPL officials said. FPL has 4.4 million customers in Florida.
About 40,000 FPL customers lost service in Manatee and Sarasota counties. FPL has about 400,000 customers in those two counties.
About 7,000 customers lost power in Charlotte County.
Power was restored throughout most of the state by 5:30 p.m. No injuries were reported.
Locally, traffic lights at dozens of intersections in Southwest Florida went down temporarily, and area businesses also lost power. Several area hospitals switched to backup generators to provide power.
An FPL spokesman initially said its nuclear plant caused the outages. But the utility’s nuclear spokesman, Dick Winn, later said the electric grid problems caused both Turkey Point reactors to shut down.
The outages had no connection to terrorism, officials said, and were caused by technical problems and not criminal acts.
Craig Fugate, the director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, said that the state’s National Guard had been put on notice for possible activation in case widespread outages continued into the evening and security was necessary.
Fugate said the Turkey Point nuclear plant was shut down appropriately when the substation failed. But he expressed mild frustration at the lack of information surrounding just what caused the outage and the resulting “cascading impact” of power loss around the state.
FPL spokesman Mel Klein said the company was trying to determine what caused the equipment failure and fire at the substation that led to the outage. Klein also said such equipment failure should been contained to the substation that caught fire and not have caused the widespread blackouts.
The electric grid is interconnected but there are many break points that are designed to isolate a disturbance. When that safety point failed, the rest of the system performed as designed, Klein said.
“It’s clear that the system, which is designed to separate and isolate problems, did not operate at this one location,” Klein said.
Nancy Argenziano, a former GOP state lawmaker from Dunnellon and current member of the state’s Public Service Commission said the reaction to the fire was a “good sign.”
“Everything that happened today really happened the way it was designed to,” she said of the rolling blackout. “I’m not sure that it wasn’t blown out of proportion. Sometimes equipment fails.”
Argenziano also said Tuesday’s outages pointed out the state’s precarious energy future due to explosive growth and the peninsula’s isolation that prevents its grid from linking into neighboring states in case of problems.
She said that “until we all purchase solar panels,” pursuing nuclear energy was the best option to generate power in a “green” manner.
It is unclear what effect, if any, Tuesday’s blackout will have on FPL’s efforts to build two more nuclear reactors at the Turkey Point plant. FPL has said the expansion will cost up to $24 billion and could be ready to go online around 2018.
Turkey Point, which faces several years of reviews by other state agencies and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, is among the first wave of 21 new nuclear-power projects proposed around the country.
The first of Turkey Point’s two nuclear power units started operation in 1972, the second a year later.
The plant has had a couple of problems of late.
In 2005, one of the nuclear reactors was shut down after a transformer caught fire.
A year later a tiny hole was found in a coolant pipe at the plant. The FBI determined it was vandalism, not sabotage.
In January, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission proposed a $208,000 fine against FPL for repeated security violations at the plant.
Staff writer Joe Follick and researcher Cindy Allegretto contributed to this report. Information from the Associated Press was also used in the story.