Red Springs commissioners request independent review after April 7 power surge

The Town of Red Springs moved on July 4 to press for an independent engineering review of the town’s electrical system after residents reported a disruptive power surge on April 7.

Commissioner Vernon, who raised residents’ concerns during the meeting’s public-comment portion, said he had documentation that his property experienced a surge and urged the council to “get somebody here to analyze it” so the town can learn whether the problem was an act of God or the result of something that can be corrected. “We need to know what’s causing this,” Vernon said.

Town Manager (addressing the council) said staff will pursue a two-pronged approach: a general evaluation of the utility system’s current condition and an independent, focused assessment of the April 7 incident. “It’s the evaluation of the system, the current condition of the system, and where we are falling short and where we need to make those improvements,” the manager said, adding that an independent person could be asked to assess April 7 specifically. The manager also said town staff have asked regional utilities to share logs; she said the town’s contacts reached out to Duke Energy to request log data for the time of the incident.

The manager noted she has invited affected residents to meet with staff and that only one person had requested a meeting so far. Commissioners reiterated that while a system evaluation could identify infrastructure needs, residents want answers about their individual outages; the two-pronged proposal is intended to address both.

Next steps the council discussed include soliciting engineers to perform a system evaluation, asking an independent consultant to analyze the April 7 event, and requesting outage/log data from neighboring utilities and Duke Energy. No formal vote on hiring a specific firm was recorded at the meeting.

The council’s further actions and any contract or cost details were not specified during the meeting.