Pinedale customers lose electricity
Short power outage Monday morning
by Dawn Ballou, Pinedale Online
March 30, 2009
Residents in the Pinedale area lost electricity for about 45 minutes on Monday morning.
According to Rocky Mountain Power (RMP) spokesperson Jeff Hymas, technicians had to make emergency damage repair to fix some equipment on a power line.
The outage affected about 1800 customers in the Pinedale area. Residents in the Cora and Pape Ranches area reported they retained power. Big Piney was not affected by the outage.
Initially not all customers lost complete power. Some people reported a power flux around 10:00 a.m. Other customers lost total power at that time.
In addition, the Sublette County Sheriff’s Office 911 Emergency phone lines went down at about the same time. The Sheriff’s Office contacted KPIN radio and Pinedale Online asking to get word out for residents to use the Sheriff’s Office regular phone numbers if they have to report an emergency. CenturyTel got the 911 lines back in operation within about ten minutes.
In order to complete the repairs to the power line, RMP technicians had to turn off power to all customers around 10:20 a.m. Power was restored at 10:43 a.m. In all, the outage lasted about 45 minutes for some customers in the Pinedale area, others were only without power for about ten minutes.
Hymas said he did not know the cause of the equipment failure, however the area was experiencing high winds at the time, which he speculated may have been a contributing factor.
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