Ocracoke on generator power Tuesday as Tideland installs new power cable
Ocracoke will be powered by generator for much of Tuesday as work continues installing nearly 10,000 feet of cable in a trench along Pole Road in Cape Hatteras National Seashore at the south end of Hatteras Island.
Both Hatteras and Ocracoke islands will be operating on generator power for much of the day to allow for work on transmission lines.
“You may experience a brief outage when we switch to generator power and when the work concludes and we switch back over to transmission power,” said Tideland in a Facebook post.
The new submarine cable from Tideland Electric Membership Corporation will create a more reliable connection to power for Ocracoke, eliminating the need for the continued presence and maintenance by Tideland and Cape Hatteras Electric Cooperative to feed electricity to Ocracoke Island.
The project to replace the overhead power lines is necessitated by the 1.5 miles of beach erosion that has occurred along the shoreline of Hatteras Inlet since Hurricane Isabel in 2003.
As the project is completed, outages will occur throughout the day in Rodanthe, Waves, Salvo and Avon as customers are switched from the off-island high voltage feed to the generator in Buxton.
Both power companies ask that customers conserve electricity as much as possible during the day on Tuesday to minimize the load pulled by the generators.
