Icy and windy conditions led to an outage in Alliance on Saturday evening and on early Sunday; however, according to officials, it could have been much worse.
City of Alliance Electric Superintendent Kirby Bridge explained that troubles started showing on Saturday afternoon when “blinks” started occurring in the system.
“That’s when the ice started forming on the lines,” said Bridge. “Most of the blinks, if not all of them, were coming through the incoming power through WAPA (Western Area Power Administration). They were having problems west and south, and north of us. They were having problems all over. The majority of the blinks were coming from the incoming power.”
The City of Alliance lost power for the first time Saturday evening just after 10:40 p.m., Bridge explained. He said the outage was caused by galloping lines.
“I got ahold of WAPA, and they lost a line that goes from West 10th Street west to Snake Creek,” said Bridge. “It was galloping too much, and they couldn’t get it to go back in, so they had to do some switching to feed us back in the north. They got that done, and we came back on. We still had some blinking and stuff going on because of the lines slapping on their system, but they got us back on.”
The power tripped one more time in the city, Bridge noted, just before 1 a.m. Sunday. He explained that the Berea area experienced an outage earlier than Alliance, at roughly 9 p.m. Bridge said that the power was restored to Berea at around 10:30 p.m.
“They stayed on until Sunday morning, then the line stopped up there again and opened that reclosure back up, and they were out for probably an hour, hour and a half Sunday morning until we got them back on,” Bridge said. “The biggest outage we had on our system were those two. We had at least one rural resident who was without power for a few hours, but we got them fixed back up. There was some small stuff around town.”
Bridge said they lost at least one pole that they knew of at press time on Monday morning, which they were heading out to fix. He explained that the weather conditions Saturday evening made it difficult for the crews to restore power.
“It was nearly impossible to see,” said Bridge. “When the guys went to Berea Saturday night, they said it was terrible up there. They had no visibility. They couldn’t see. Luckily they could get to the piece of equipment they needed to to close it back in. It took a lot of effort to get that done. Being in town, most people didn’t realize how bad it was out in the country. Once you get away from all the buildings and the trees, it’s a lot worse.
“With all that ice on the line, there’s nothing we can do,” Bridge said. “We have miles and miles and miles of line that have ice on them, you can’t stop that stuff and you can’t knock it all off. Mother Nature has to take care of it.”
Bridge noted that they are limited in what they can do when the whole system is experiencing blinks.
“Generally, it’s the incoming power, or it’s the whole circuit, and something is slapping, or rubbing,” said Bridge. “We try to fix it, but a lot of that was the ice doing that, and there’s nothing we can do about it. In a situation like Saturday night, as long as the lights are on, be thankful. When the storm is that bad, there’s just not a lot we can do about it.”
Bridge explained that the City of Alliance was fortunate in this outage, noting that if they had not been maintaining and upgrading the equipment, this outage could have been far worse.
“We’ve done a lot of maintenance, especially on our rural system in the last 10 years,” said Bridge. “Had we not done that, we would be a lot worse than we are right now. We’ve put in a lot of poles in the last 10 years and fixed a lot of lines that probably would be laying on the ground right now if we wouldn’t have. I definitely know we would be in a lot worse scenario, with the amount of ice we had, if we had not done a lot of maintenance in the last 10 years. We definitely are dedicated, and we try, but in situations like this, we can only do so much.”