Dauphin Island residents should not expect their power to come on for much of the day on Wednesday.
Alabama Power will follow through with its scheduled power outage on Dauphin Island. The outage will occur on Wednesday, Nov. 3. It will start at 9 a.m. and end at 5 p.m.
Beth Thomas is the community affairs manager for Alabama Power in Mobile. Thomas said the electric service company worked directly with town officials to schedule the outage. She said the town determined the date and time according to what would be least impactful to residents.
“Well, we worked together with the town of Dauphin Island to actually schedule the power outage,” Thomas said. “We’ve worked closely with the town on this scheduling. It’s actually a partnership between Alabama Power and the town of Dauphin Island.”
The outage will take place so that service workers may upgrade the equipment that provides power to the island. Most upgrades will take place north of Dauphin Island, but final installments require the island to be without power. Thomas said that the best way for this equipment to be installed is for all power to be suspended.
“We want to be able to make the upgrades as safely as possible,” Thomas said. “So, we will be suspending the power on the island during that time so that our workers can safely perform the work.”
Thomas said she strongly recommends residents to follow through with any preparations they may need to make before the outage occurs.
“We want people to be aware,” Thomas said. “Any preparations that people could make ahead of time, we just want people to be aware that there will not be electric service on the island on Nov. 3.”
Dauphin Island Mayor Jeff Collier said he hopes the upgrades will allow residents to have the services they need during inclement weather.
“There’s been some issues in the past where if you get storm conditions, I don’t even mean hurricanes, but just thunderstorms, high winds, we will have some brownouts and things of that nature,” Collier said. “Hopefully, this is going to improve the day-to-day service but also give us a higher level of protection when we do have adverse weather.”
Collier said he appreciates Alabama Power and its contributions in making life on the island better.
“It’s one of those things that’s never convenient to be without power, but we also realize that this one day of inconvenience is going to pay dividends in the future,” Collier said. “We can put up with a day of outage to have better service for years to come.”
Alabama Power has no future outages planned for the island at this time.
