Southwest Mississippi Electric Power Association doesn’t keepits customers in the dark unless there is a very good reason.

On Friday between 9 and 9:30 a.m., Southwest Mississippi EPAmembers who receive their services from the Brookhaven substationon Highway 550 will be without power for about an hour as thecompany re-energizes the power complex that burned in February of2009.

Southwest EPA Public Relations Director Azalea Knight said thesubstation was rebuilt after the fire knocked it out of commission.Since then, power for the area including part of Brookway Boulevardhas been split between a portable substation located on site, theLoyd Star substation and the Center Point substation.

Officials farmed out the power load last summer when thetemperatures skyrocketed early and people began turning up theirair conditioners earlier in the season.

The transformer that was lost in the fire was a 20 megavoltampere (MVA) unit. The mobile unit brought in to temporarilyreplace it only accommodated half the capacity, so officialsdecided to take the proactive measure of putting another new mobileunit in the Loyd Star substation, which is farther west on thehighway than the Brookhaven substation.

But now the full power load will be back on the Brookhavensubstation.

“We’re in the process of re-energizing the rebuilt substation,so the outage will be due to some maintenance that needs to befinalized before the full re-energizing of the station,” shesaid.

The brief blackout will affect about 2,500 customers, as well asseveral businesses on Brookway Boulevard, Knight said, but itshould only last around an hour.

Knight said the company is proud to have been able to find othersolutions when the vital substation went down, and companyofficials are even more proud to be able to get it back up andrunning.

“We were fortunate in that we own a portable substation that wecould bring in, and it’s visible there in the back of the burnedsubstation,” she said. “We want to thank all of our customers fortheir patience while we’re rebuilding, as well as theirunderstanding.”

Once the power redistribution is done, everything should be backto full speed, Knight said.

“It’ll be all back up and running after that,” she said. “Andhopefully the one hour will prove beneficial in the end to ourmembers with the re-energizing of the new substation.”