We just spoke with Bobby Randolph, manager of VEC, who told us the major power outage in Cumberland County originated with the same sub-station that exploded and lit up the sky back in January of this year.  Randolph told CNF that the sub-station, located on Highway 70 E just outside of Crossville suffered a transformer meltdown leaving more than half the county without electricity Saturday afternoon.  By 7:20pm most all the VEC customers had power restored. The most recent outage on October 9th was caused by a squirrel getting into the transformers at the sub-station.  That caused about 2,000 customers to lose power.   So this time – no critters were involved in the huge outage. To add to VEC headaches, high winds were causing minor outages throughout the county all day which helped raise the total outage numbers.  Many VEC workers spent their Saturday tracking down and repairing lines and equipment to get electricity back on for thousands of customers.  We commend them on a job well done.