Hundreds of Lincoln County residents had their routinesdisrupted Sunday morning after a regulator at the SouthwestMississippi Electric Power Company substation on Highway 550 caughtfire just before 8 a.m.

The fire lined the horizon in the Loyd Star area with alow-lying plume of black smoke that resembled an incoming storm.Civil Defense Director Clifford Galey said emergency workers wereforced to close and re-route Highway 550 from Dunn-Ratcliff Road toWeeks Lane.

“We closed the road because we had so many different agenciesthere for the response,” he said. “And initially we didn’t knowwhat we had, so we had to be safe.”

Southwest officials said some 2,000 customers lost power as aresult of the outage. For many people, the power outage meantchurch services in the dark and fewer restaurant options to choosefrom afterward.

Cracker Barrel Old Country Store General Manager Jim Jolly saidwhen the power went out at 7:50 a.m. at his store, he and hisemployees could see the smoke from the dining room window.

“The power flickered and then went out, and I could see big darkblack smoke across where the substation is, kind of across theinterstate,” he said. “We thought the oil field might have been onfire because it was really black, and a lot of smoke.”

Loyd Star Volunteer Fire Chief Mark Porter said the fire was, ineffect, not just an electrical fire but also an oil fire sincethere is oil in the equipment that burned. He said the Loyd Star,New Sight and Zetus VFDs were able to contain the fire and cooldown the regulator to keep it from re-igniting.

“At first we just stood back and waited until someone from thepower company got there and made sure the power was dead, then putfoam on it to put the fire out,” Porter said. “As far as the oil inthe regulators, as hot as it was we had to cool it down to keep itfrom reaching its ignition point.”

Southwest Plant Manager Kevin Bonds said the cause of the fireis unknown, but that experts will be on the scene Monday to try todetermine what went wrong.

“We’ve got a consulting firm that does the engineering for us,that deals with transformers and regulators, and we want them lookat the site before too much time passes,” he said.

Bonds said in the mean time, a mobile substation has been put into replace the burned units. He said the mobile substation could bein place for up to five months while officials work on rebuildingthe damaged equipment.

Galey said emergency workers from the volunteer firedepartments, Mississippi Highway Patrol, Civil Defense, the LincolnCounty Sheriff’s Department and the Mississippi Department ofHealth stayed on the scene Sunday until about 2:30 p.m. Bonds said75 percent of Southwest customers had their power restored by 4p.m., and the rest were back up by 6:15 p.m. Sunday.

Bonds said crews worked to back feed lines from the Loyd Starand Center Point substations to get as many customers’ power backas possible while work continued inside the affectedsubstation.

“The mobilization, setup and commissioning of our mobilesubstation usually takes 18 to 24 hours,” Bonds said. “Because ofthe special efforts of our engineering, construction and servicedepartments, power was restored to all customers by 6:15 p.m.”

One area impacted by the outage was the western end of BrookwayBoulevard.

Some restaurant operators said they had to stay closed in spiteof getting the lights back on in their businesses. They said theywere expecting the power outage to be an all-day affair.

“It shut us down completely and we were unable to operate at allyesterday, and this morning we had to throw some things away,” saidBroma’s manager and owner Donnie Mitchell on Monday.

Mitchell said his restaurant probably lost about $7,000 fromSunday business. Although power was restored late in the day, hisrestaurant did not reopen.

“It takes two to three hours to get prepped before everyonecomes in,” Mitchell said. “It would have been closing time by thetime we were ready to reopen.”

At Cracker Barrel, Jolly said the after-church crowd brings hisbiggest lunch revenue of the week, and that he may have lost asmuch as $12,000 in the dark.

Galey said in all his years in emergency services, he has onlyseen two electrical fires of the nature of the one on Highway550.

“It was unusual situation; this doesn’t normally happen,” hesaid. “Everybody involved from the power company to thefirefighters to the law enforcement to the Department of Healthmade an unusual situation seem routine by following their trainingand incident command and working together.”

Officials from Southwest Mississippi EPA were in a meetingMonday morning to discuss their next course of action. Bonds saidSouthwest customers may have some brief flickers or outagesthroughout the day Monday as work continues to stabilize andrestore the systems.

“Today we have crews in the area checking on voltage andrerouting power from all three of these substations to customers,”he said Monday. “Intermittent outages may occur during switching,but this is to be sure that customers continue to have power withminimum interruptions due to this incident.”