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Tupper Lake plans power outage Saturday

TUPPER LAKE — The village will experience a power outage starting at 6 a.m. Saturday that is expected to last three hours while members of the electric department repair the porcelain insulators at an electric sub-station.

A press release from the village said the outage will start on Demars Boulevard at the former Oval Wood Dish factory and extend to all of uptown, including French Village, Park Street and Stetson Road to the Harrietstown line.

Electric Department Superintendent Marc Staves said while searching for the cause of a problem, department members found cracks in the porcelain.

“What ends up happening is you start having wide swings in temperature, you have differential temperatures in the different materials,” Staves said. “Porcelain and metal, they start working against each other and they crack.”

The department will shut down several circuits at the sub-station, cutting off power to a few critical nearby poles that distribute electricity to the rest of the village.

Route 30 south (Moody Road) and downtown will remain powered.

Staves said the majority of village will experience the outage, so he is glad he could plan it for Saturday, one of the warmest days predicted for the near future.

He said porcelain can actually explode in some cases after cracking, so this work avoids the possibility of a 10- to 12-hour outage that would be caused if an insulator exploded.

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