Lightning strikes kills power to large swath of county
A lightning strike on Wood Hill Sunday evening knocked out power to a widespread area of Western Carbon County, from Helper to Wellington.
Price City Utilities Customer Service Manager Bret Cammans said 4,200 homes and businesses in Price were affected by the outage when lightning hit a transmission line which in turn, impacted a substation on the grid. He said one or two “feeds” went down at the substation, which is key to the system because that’s where all power comes into Price.
The power was out for about two hours, beginning at 6:14 p.m. Cammans said. At first, there was still low or partial power, sometimes referred to as a “brownout.” He said because that can damage some electric motors and components, “we took the power down completely until it was fully restored.”
Cammans said the outage could have been longer but, “Rocky Mountain Power re-routed the power and got us back on line.”
Rocky Mountain Power spokesman Spencer Hall said 2,278 customers in their service area were affected. He explained the power grid is segmented, and crews were able to switch around and isolate the problem area, and switch to a 46 KV line to restore power. He said power was back on at 8:05 p.m.