Tuesday afternoon, Gulf Power Company was forced to interrupt electric service for 4,400 customers in the Milton area after a routine inspection at a substation revealed a critical piece of equipment was vandalized.

“It appears to us that this equipment, what we call an interrupter, was shot,” said Sandy Sims, Gulf Power Public Affairs manager. “Unfortunately, this interrupter is critical to the reliability of the entire substation, and the only way to repair it safely was to turn the entire substation off.

“We apologize for the short notice, but this situation needed to be addressed right away before it caused an unplanned outage that would have taken much longer to find and repair. The routine patrol is part of our ongoing efforts to keep the system at its peak operating efficiency.”

Gulf Power customers in a general area bounded on the west by the Blackwater River, on the north by Interstate 10 and on the south by Nichols Lake Road were affected by the outage.

Gulf Power Company is an investor-owned electric utility with all of its common stock owned by Atlanta-based Southern Company. Gulf Power serves more than 400,000 customers in 10 counties throughout Northwest Florida. The company’s mission is to safely deliver affordable, reliable and environmentally responsible energy to very satisfied customers in strong communities.

###