Power outage 3 hours over; Bonneville requested time

The lights went out in Polson as scheduled last Saturday night (Oct. 17), but the following Sunday morning power didn’t come back on until well into the morning. Bonneville Power Administration’s project to update the incoming Kalispell power lines, construct new supporting poles, and fasten new grounding structures was scheduled to be finished within an eight hour window, but that didn’t happen. There were delays and unforeseen problems to completing the project on schedule. These setbacks caused Bonneville to extend the outage by three hours. The power outage, the largest and longest outage Mission Valley Power has seen since its inception, affected 13,000 customers over a sprawling area from Finley Point to Charlo and everywhere in between. The scheduled outage started Saturday night and extended to Sunday morning around 10:30 a.m. for most MVP customers.

“Well we had a planned outage that turned into an unplanned outage,” MVP General Manager Jean Matt said. “They weren’t able to complete [the update] in time.”

As far as Matt knows, the outage was “unprecendented” and the longest that he’s aware of; Matt likes to keep the numbers low. So low he said until this weekend’s outage, the yearly average for outage times is about 1.4 hours per household. “This weekend will obviously be an outlier,” he said. “The good thing is that we won’t have this problem in the future because of these upgrades. It’s been long overdue.”

For the past two weeks, the Bonneville Power Administration has been on the ground at the Kerr Dam grounds in preparation for the transferral of new lines into the substation. They hit a couple of rough spots in their planning. First, construction crews discovered digging under the ground was going to take longer than they had anticipated. Crews kept hitting rockbeds and rough soil which caused the whole line of logistics to shift. Another problem presented itself when BPA realized the distance between the upper and lower lines were too close. They didn’t know until the early morning hours of Sunday that they wouldn’t meet the deadline.

BPA needed more time to move the lines, and officials called Matt around seven that morning to inform him that crews would need more time. “They also needed to make sure that all the codes were met,” Matt said.

Part of MVP’s strategy for delievering information to customers was an all-out assault via media.

“We put ads in the newspapers, on the radio, anything to get the word out,” Matt said. His hope was that everyone knew the situation beforehand. This past Monday, Matt and other members at MVP participated in “After Action Reviews” to assess what could be learned from this weekend’s outage. “This has actually made me think about the future in terms of ‘what happens if there’s another outage?’” he said. “We need to do more about preparation in cases like [the power outage].” Matt said a Mission Valley team was standing by on Sunday morning as a precationary measure. However, once the power was turned back on, the resurgence of electric current knocked out a couple of circuits. “We had them fixed in 15 minutes.”

“On a whole I thought we were prepared,” Matt said. “But we can still work on our communication.”

Mission Valley Power will soon open a Facebook page so that customers can get direct information in the future. After power was restored, the system was up and running.

Some local businesses in Polson felt the aftereffects of the outage, though. There were reports of an ATM that was malfunctioning at the Super 1 grocery store, prompting a call to get the machine serviced. Safeway had an even bigger disruption to business on Sunday. According to a cashier who was working on Sunday, after power was restored most of the stores freezers and coolers stopped working. Potentially thousands of dollars worth of meat and cheeses needed to be discarded Sunday afternoon.

According to Lake County law enforcement, no unusual activites occurred aside from a couple of neighborhood bonfires lighting the sky.