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Fire At PECO Substation In Montgomery County Adds To Power Outages

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - Firefighters in Montgomery County are battling a Two-alarm fire at the PECO substation in Whitemarsh Township. That fire is the reason for a lot of area outages.

PECO spokesperson Fred Maher says the fire at the PECO substation at 551 Bethlehem Pike started just before 12:30 p.m. "We have crews on site, we know its impacting about 10,000 customers and we are working feverishly to get those folks back on and we have remedy plans in place."

He says there are no injuries reported, and there is minimal area damage as substations tend to be located in remote areas, including the one in Whitemarsh Township.

So what exactly is a substation?

"A substation is an area that allows us to take the transmission level of electricity and knock it down to a level that can be used. We transfer it from there onto the residential side."

Maher says they'll be able to restore the outages as soon as they are able to transfer power from one area of the substation to another.

Reported By Hadas Kuznits, KYW Newsradio.

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