Natural gas service interrupted to businesses in Lebanon

(KY3)
Published: Jan. 18, 2018 at 4:52 PM CST
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A big part of Lebanon's economy is its industrial base, and over the last couple of days six manufacturers and 1,100 employees were affected by this incident including Emerson, the city's second largest employer.

"That's a significant amount of the workforce in Lebanon," explained mayor Jared Carr. "They're not getting their paychecks because they're not getting paid because they're not able to work because their employer is shut down."

The outrage was so intense that city officials got inundated with calls.

"I'm sure Summit was hearing a lot more than we were hearing," said the mayor with a laugh.

But Summit Natural Gas says it was actually doing something those industries had agreed to. As the contracts between the two gave the factories up to a 25% discount in their rates if they would agree to interruptions in service during peak demand shortages.

"We have those contracts in place so that we can assure the reliability of the firm residential and commercial customers," explained Phil Marcum, the Lebanon representative for Summit Natural Gas. "There's always frustration and its regrettable when we have to do curtailments. It doesn't happen very often. It's been very rare. In fact in the Lebanon area we've only had to curtail one other time and that was in 2013."

The mayor was not aware of Summit's curtailment contracts.

"It kinda brought light to that," he said. "But I didn't know it outright."

And Summit admits that it was a black-eye for the company.

"We're not numb to the situation," Marcum said. "We understand there's going to be impact on the community. All we can do is insure the reliability and safety of our system because it's our top priority and serve our firm customers in peak demand."

And Summit is working to improve its services by installing a new compressor in the next month.

"We are updating our system to double our capacity so that we don't put ourselves, or the industrials, or the city in this situation in the future," Marcum said.

"Going forward I see it as a positive," mayor Carr added. "Let's learn from it and let's create something that's not going to cause this problem in the future."