The city of Laurinburg’s electric grid went dark for nearly an hour just before noon on Friday, leading to the early release of Scotland County schools. Reports of locals stranded in line at the grocery store and of computer-dependent offices being closed early flooded the city’s switchboard around 11:30 a.m. on Friday, according to city hall officials. Interim City Manager Harold Haywood said the outage was related to the ongoing repair and replacement work being done by Progress Energy that led to a scheduled outage this past Sunday, March 17. According to Haywood, Progress Energy workers changed the city’s power grid over to a temporary breaker system so that they could spend the week replacing the main unit at the city substation on West Boulevard. “That temporary breaker was accidentally tripped and we are not sure why. We are thinking that something happened to one of our circuits, and really anything could cause it – from a limb on a line to a squirrel,” Haywood said. Power was restored in less than an hour, but there will be another scheduled outage at 6 a.m. on Sunday so that Progress Energy’s work can be finalized. That outage, like the one this past Sunday, is expected to take less than 30 minutes. “This is required for Progress Energy to finish up the work on their equipment and for the city crews to repair another piece of equipment that was found to need repair after last Sunday’s scheduled outage,” Haywood said in a Friday afternoon statement. “The outage this Sunday is meant to take the city off the temporary breaker and put us back on our fixed system.” Haywood said that moving back to the fixed system would provide the city with more stability going forward. Safety concerns caused Scotland County Schools to dismiss students early, starting with elementary schools at noon and ending with early college at 1 p.m. “Because of the way our buses work it would be pretty much impossible to dismiss some schools and not all of them,” said schools spokesman Andy Cagle when asked why schools outside of the area affected by the outage were also dismissed. Scotland High, Sycamore Lane, Covington Street, I. Ellis Johnson, North Laurinburg and Washington Park schools were all left without power following the substation failure. “Without power they didn’t have phones because many of them are Voice over IP phones, and they didn’t have lights, so we couldn’t finish schools without electricity,” Cagle said. School system faculty were even forced to manually secure the buildings at the high school because of the electronic system governing the door locks. Cagle concluded that the move had to be made “for the safety of all our kids.”