Florida Gas Transmission recovered quickly getting most of its1.5 Bcf/d mainline capacity back in service by last Tuesday, Aug.18, after all the gas flowing to the Florida peninsula was cut offby a lightning strike, rupture and fire the previous Friday.

The lightning struck FGT’s Station 15 near Perry innorth-central Florida, and knocked out all downstream service. The24-inch, 30-inch and 36-inch mainlines that converge in the stationyard were affected.

The 30-inch line was placed back in service Sunday using abypass, restoring 800,000 MMBtu/d of capacity for Monday’s gas day.Proceeding more quickly than anticipated with a second bypass FGTplaced the 36-inch mainline back in service on Tuesday, increasingthe amount of downstream capacity to about 1,240,000 MMBtu/d. The24-inch mainline was brought back on-line late Wednesday afternoon.

“It’s had a major impact on our largest customers: largeindustrial organizations, hospitals, prisons, large manufacturingbusinesses, businesses that are driven by gas technology,” saidTeco Energy spokesman Mike Mahony. Teco subsidiary Peoples Gas isthe largest retail gas distributor in the state of Florida,delivering 900 million therms per year of gas to 300,000 customers.”We had to contact 50 of our largest gas customers statewide andask them to curtail their loads until we could resume normalservice to them,” said Mahony. “Most of them did have oil as theirback-up and most had adequate reserves, but there were some thatdidn’t have sufficient back-up fuel. We tried to work with them asmuch as possible to get gas to them or at least ease the transitionfrom having a normal supply of gas to none. It’s been almost notdisruptive in any way to our residential customers whoincrementally use very little gas.”

Although it was warning South Florida residents Aug. 15 of thepossibility of rolling blackouts due to the loss of gas supply,Florida Power &amp Light said Monday the blackouts wereunnecessary. It did use load management techniques for a couple ofhours Saturday with some commercial customers. FPL, the largestcustomer of FGT, was able to return two of its larger gas-firedunits to service following Sunday’s restoration of 30-inch lineflows, said FPL spokesman Bill Swank. All of the utility’sdual-fuel units had been converted to oil use but by Tuesdaymorning, near-normal flows enabled FPL to return to gas-firedpower. The company also ended its statewide energy advisory andcanceled requests for extraordinary customer conservation measures.FPL President Paul Evanson said conservation efforts helped thecompany through the outage with “minimal disruption of service.”

A spokeswoman for Enron Corp., which co-owns Florida Gas alongwith Sonat Corp., said lightning apparently struck an above-groundcompressor station in Perry. The explosion sent a raging fireballinto the air. Four firefighters were injured and some homesdestroyed.

“I can tell you, we have never had an incident of this magnitudeinvolving lightning in the past,” Enron’s Elaine Thomas told localreporters.

Rocco Canonica

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