The St. Patrick’s Day Blackout was caused by a rare ‘salt storm’ reported Wells rural Electric Public Information Officer Veronica Hansen in a Monday press release.
“Winds blowing over the salt flats created a “salt storm” that eventually reached Raft River Electric’s substation in Idaho. Wells Rural Electric’s lines are supplied power through lines coming out of Raft River’s substation.” Hansen wrote. “The combination of salt and moisture in the air coated the insulators, essentially contaminating the substation and therefore causing the outage. This outage was not caused by equipment failure due to lack of maintenance but merely bad weather. “
[media id=13 width=320 height=240]
Wells Rural Electric members in Wendover, UT and West Wendover, NV, and surrounding areas experienced an approximately 13 hour power outage beginning on Saturday, March 17, 2012 and ending on Sunday, March 18, 2012. This outage began at approximately 8:00 pm (MST) and power was restored at around 9:00 am(MST).
Unfortunately this outage was neither something that was able to be planned for nor an outage that WREC was able to resolve as it was a matter that could only be resolved by Raft River Electric.
At this time there are currently two Raft River substations still down. Fortunately those are not affecting service in the Wendover Area.
[media id=1 width=320 height=240]
“Wells Rural Electric would like to thank its members for their patience during this unscheduled outage, and remind WREC Members that when you call to report an outage, your call is answered twenty four hours a day, seven days a week by WREC’s outage management partner The Cooperative Response Center (CRC).” Hansen added. “CRC logs every call and tracks the locations throughout the duration of an outage. They will even call you back when power has been restored to confirm that your power is on.”
We were at the Concert Hall watching a very late (due to the storm) Larry the Cable Guy when the power went out. Larry was a real trooper and even had yelled half his show. When we went back to our room at the Nugget, we found ourselves in pitch darkness, no emergency lights in the room (had a 5th floor room) at all, and very little in the halls. I don’t think we even had a working smoke alarm and it was very stressful. But the kicker is, the casino was still up and running on emergency power.
The hotel management really needs to re-think this kind of thing and make sure there are some emergency lights available in the rooms. We were navigating to the bathroom by cell phone light. From now on I’m going to be sure to keep a flashlight in my suitcase.