Columbia, SC (WLTX) -- Fort Jackson says that almost half of the base went without power after a fire at a sub station knocked the power offline Tuesday afternoon.
The power was back to 100% late Tuesday night.
Fort Jackson, the military base that trains nearly 35,000 soldiers yearly, and having had to make due with nearly half of the base without power was tough.
"We don't know exactly what happened, but it knocked the power out," base spokesman Pat Jones says after Tuesday nights storm rolled through, this substation became overloaded, caused a small fire, then knocking power and A/C, offline.
"A good bit of Fort Jackson is cooled by that chiller plant so all those buildings and offices have been without air conditioning today so it's been pretty warm."
Jones says the power, or lack there of, comes from SCE&G. He adds that this is the first time he can remember an outage of this magnitude on base effecting offices and houses.
The hospital at the Fort as also a casuality of the power outage. However, with a backup generator in place, only a few appointments and surgeries had to be rescheduled.
"They have emergency lighting. Their air conditioning was out. But for all the in-patient care and stuff like that, they were given priority on the power," said Jones. "So there was never a problem with the people who were actually in the hospital."
As for soldier training, many of the exercise had to be scaled down to adjust for the lack of electronics.
"They could still do some rifle marksmanship training. They just couldn't necessarily do it on those electronically controlled targets."
With stop lights out all over base causing a few traffic concerns, Jones says it's certainly been a headache but one they should soon have fixed.
"If it's all a go they'll turn the power back on and we will slowly bring everything back online," said Jones.
Fort Jackson says they will take a look at this situation to see if they can make any adjustments to the grid or power procedures to help prevent an outage like this from re-occurring.