Snow accumulating on power lines that serve La Plata Electric Association’s Shenandoah station west of Durango put 2,775 LPEA members in the dark at about 7 a.m. Saturday as the snow fell from lines, causing them to shake.
The lines belong to Tri-State, whose crews responded immediately to determine the cause of the outage and restore power to impacted residents, Hillary Knox, LPEA spokeswoman, said.
She said power crews found to no big surprise that large quantities of snow accumulated on the power lines before toppling over, jostling the lines in the process. The event is called “unloading” and can impact miles of lines, another phenomenon known as “galloping.”
Power was restored to LPEA members by 8:30 a.m., she said.
It took another 15 minutes to fully restore all LPEA members, a news release says.
Outages are common during inclement weather, especially with heavy and wet snowfall, for the Durango area.
“Be aware, whenever there is inclement weather in our area, whenever there’s an ice storm or heavy quantities of snow, especially if it’s wet, heavy snow, outages are pretty normal during those times,” Knox said.
As snow continues to accumulate on power lines and begins to melt, additional outages become more likely because of unloading in addition to trees and tree limbs that might fall onto power lines, she said.
“We would just encourage folks to be prepared for that,” she said.
LPEA hosts a range of tips and advice in the case of an outage on its website at lpea.coop/safety-resources.
A guide on how to be “outage ready” is also available at lpea.coop/safety/how-be-outage-ready.
Resources include information about standby generator safety, an electrical safety checklist, children’s safety and more guidance.
What does it take to restore an outage like the one that occurred Saturday morning in the Shenandoah area?
Knox said crews survey power lines to determine the cause of the outage. In cases like the Shenandoah outage, it might be apparent that snow unloading is the source of the problem.
But when the cause is not apparent, power crews have to survey the lines, she said.
“Everybody wants to know when their power’s going to be back on, right? I would, too. But the challenge is our crews do not know what the cause of an outage is until they report on the scene,” she said. “When they report on the scene, they may see something really obvious like a pole down, like a tree in the line, like a car or a snowplow hit a transformer or junction box.”
When unloading is the problem, there’s nothing that really needs to be fixed – once crews are certain of the cause of the outage, they can re-energize the lines without danger, Knox said.
Lots of snow means lots of moisture, and because water is a conductor of electricity, outages in the snow pose additional risk to power crews, she said. Extra steps are taken to protect crews surveying lines and making repairs. This means power restoration might take longer than it would in calmer weather, and makes it difficult for LPEA to estimate when service will be returned.
There isn’t a single utility in the world that can guarantee service 100% of the time, and so residents should be prepared for the eventuality that they will lose power at some point, Knox said.
“If the power does go out, thanks to our automated metering infrastructure we usually know as soon as our members do,” she said. “So I think they can just rest assured that whenever there are outages, our crews are fully deployed in the field and they don’t rest until the power comes back on.”
cburney@durangoherald.com
