Brewton and East Brewton were left in the dark for several hours Saturday night. But a survey of store owners shows the damage and losses due to the outage were minimal across the area.
Alabama Power manager Larry Woods, said the power outage was widespread due to the failure of a main transformer — an incident that left many without power for several hours.
Woods said that the blackout occurred because of a broken pole at the North Brewton Substation.
“It’s just as simple as that,” Woods said. “The problem was that it was in an area hard to get to. We had to get equipment out of Mobile so that we could get to it and get it repaired. We had to look at the larger areas and get that power back on as soon as we could. The power was only off a couple of hours in those areas but in the North Brewton area there was no power until the next morning.”
Judy Nall, manager at Piggly Wiggly in East Brewton, said they lost power about 8 p.m. Saturday night, but it came back on at 9:38 p.m.
“The power wasn’t out for very long,” Nall said. “I have heard that others lost perishable items, but we didn’t. When the lights went out, we were still open, but we closed and got everybody out as soon as we could. The power wasn’t even off long enough to make my house on Douglas Avenue get hot.”
Peggy Booker, manager of Belle Foods. which is located in the north end of Brewton, said the store didn’t suffer as badly as they could have.
“We lost power sometime around 8 p.m. and didn’t get it back until the next morning,” Booker said. “I spent the night at the store and we were able to save most of what we had. We had back-up generators and the company sent some refrigerated trucks to take care of us. We had just a little that we pulled, but not much.”
According to Wal Mart spokeswoman, Kayla Whaling, the store in Brewton was left with no power for several hours, causing them to lose some perishables. Whaling did not know how much they lost, but wanted customers to know that they did what they needed to do to retain the top quality in their products.
“The power loss resulted in our closing the store as quickly as we could,” Whaling said. “We had some refrigerated trucks to save what we could. Any food product that we had any question about was discarded.
“We want our customers to know that we take no chances on offering them anything but a quality product.”