LAKE PLACID — Twelve households on Algonquin Drive were left without power for several hours on Sunday, Jan. 2 after a volunteer firefighter drove into an electrical transformer.

Lake Placid Volunteer Fire Department Chief Michael St. Louis was responding to a fire call on the morning of Jan. 2 when his car slid off Algonquin Drive and struck the power transformer, knocking it partially off its concrete base, according to a report from the New York State Police Public Information Office. The crash wasn’t reported to State Police until 10:10 a.m., according to the report, and no tickets were issued to St. Louis.

State Police say the crash happened around 2:30 a.m., but St. Louis said he was responding to a 1:45 a.m. fire call when he slid off the road. The village electric department was on the scene assessing whether or not the crash caused a power outage on Algonquin when State Police arrived following the 10:10 a.m. call.

St. Louis said Friday that he didn’t know he hit the transformer and that someone from Central Garage towed him out of the snowbank following the accident. St. Louis said the weather conditions were “crappy” and dark, with snow and freezing rain. He said he saw two telephone boxes in the snowbank near his vehicle, but that he avoided hitting those. He said his truck wasn’t damaged.

Village Mayor Art Devlin said he wasn’t sure if the transformer was damaged by St. Louis’s vehicle striking it or from the tow truck hook that pulled the vehicle out of the snowbank, but that the accident caused an oil spill from the transformer, resulting in about 4.5 gallons of oil leaking out onto the surrounding area. He said that a spill response team is required to perform a cleanup if more than two gallons of oil are spilled, and a team came out to mitigate the problem. Devlin said Lake Placid Electrical Superintendent Kimball Daby estimated the total cost of the spill response and replacement transformer to be around $10,000, which Devlin said would be covered under the village’s insurance.

Devlin said that fire department volunteers are considered village employees when they are responding to fire calls or are present at the firehouse, and that those volunteers are covered by village insurance when they’re actively working for the fire department.

Devlin said St. Louis was not asked to do a drug test following the crash because the incident was “run of the mill — wasn’t even a reportable accident, really.”

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Getting the power back on

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Daby said he was the one who reported the incident to State Police. He said that firehouse dispatch alerted the electric department about a power outage that morning on Algonquin Drive after receiving multiple calls from customers there saying they had no power. Daby said neither St. Louis nor the firehouse had reported the crash to the electric department before the outage.

Daby said he wasn’t on duty that day and didn’t know about the outage or the crash until he received a text at 9:06 a.m. that morning from an electric customer on Algonquin Drive asking when their power would be restored. Daby said he then called the person on-duty at the electric department at the time, who told Daby the electric department had looked into the outage and left Algonquin Drive at 4:30 a.m. after seeing lights come on. Daby said nine customers had their power back on at 4:30 a.m. but that three customers were still left without power.

Daby said that he later drove to Algonquin Drive and discovered that a transformer had been hit and reported it to State Police.

The electric department replaced the transformer, according to Daby, but he said the initial replacement transformer was found to be faulty. The department later replaced that faulty transformer with a working one, and Daby said the remaining three customers had power by 1 p.m. that day, around 11 hours after it went out.