HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY, Fla — Hillsborough County Fire Rescue crews fought a fire at a TECO substation Friday evening that left thousands of area residents without power.
- Incident occurred around 5:30 p.m.
- Investigators believe malfunction caused explosion
- Some TECO customers still without power
A transformer explosion at the East Bay Substation — located at 7350 Big Bend Road — around 5:30 p.m. caused the fire and the subsequent outages, according to Fire Rescue officials.
The explosion ignited the mineral oil normally used to cool the transformers. The best means of fighting the fire, according to fire officials, was to keep it contained and simply wait for it to burn itself out.
"The first thing is, you can't use water with it," said Hillsborough County Fire Rescue Battalion Chief Clifford Bassett. "The second thing is you can’t see electricity — you don’t know where it is, where it isn’t."
"In this situation, we want to make sure that there’s not been any damage to the wires that may be out of position from where they normally are before we send our guys in there," Bassett said.
The fire at one point reportedly left over 4,000 customers without power. The outages were concentrated in the Riverview and Gibsonton areas of the county.
TECO is reportedly attempting to re-route power to those customer through another station. As of 9:30 p.m., 1,478 customers were still without power.