An electrical substation in Florida’s Miami-Dade County caught on fire and exploded Tuesday, leaving 10,000 people without power.
“We heard a loud explosion, everybody’s lights went out and started looking and saw the big cloud of smoke and fire” Percy Watkins, a local resident who witnessed the explosion, told ABC Local News 10. “It sounded like a bomb went off, there were several explosions.”
No injuries were reported from the explosion and a spokesperson for Florida Power & Light, which operates the substation, said that electricity was restored to all customers later that evening. The cause of the fire remains under investigation.
Most of America’s power grid was built in the 1960s and 1970s and about 70 percent of America’s transmission lines and power transformers in the country are at least 25 years old, according to the Department of Energy. Portions of America’s power grid were actually constructed during the 1880s and are old enough to have been build by Civil War veterans.
As a result of this aging electrical infrastructure, the average number of non-disaster-related blackouts which effected more than 50,000 people more than doubled in the last decade. An estimated 500,000 Americans are without electricity for at least two hours a day every day due to blackouts, according to a 2014 study. A single minute of downtime in the U.S. can cost up to $15,447, according to analysis.
Transformers, substations and other infrastructure which makes up America’s power grids are valued at trillions of dollars and can’t be replaced in a timely manner. It takes more than a year to manufacture a new transformer, and they are not interchangeable, as each one must be individually built specifically for its location.
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