UPDATE:
As of January 17th Central Lincoln PUD announced they have just over 1,000 customers without power throughout their service territory. This has been a brutal storm that has caused extensive damage to power lines and equipment. Thankfully, they had three additional mutual aid crews working with the local crews today. There are many customers who are going on day five without power they are continuing to work hard to get everyones power back on.
Central Lincoln PUD line crews worked today to restore power today but is seemed as fast as they get power on it goes out in another area. PUD line crews have been pulling in crews from other areas to help to restore power as now they have two separate transmission line outages going on right now. The first is affecting customers from South Beach to Washburne State Park. The cause of this one was ice on the lines, which caused them to sag. When the ice fell, the lower line bounced up, making contact with the sagging line above.
The second is affecting customers from Gleneden Beach to Newport. PUD said this outage is also caused by ice build up on the line that melted and snapped back to the line above causing an outage. PUD warns that this may continue to happen as ice melts and falls. Now that they know the cause they will be able to pull the necessary amount of crews to work on restoring power. PUD still has other crew working on the outages that have been affecting customers over the last few days. However restoring power to the two transmission lines is the top priority. The good news is that they have three additional mutual aid crews coming in to start helping tomorrow.
Under normal circumstances, we would have the ability to switch power to another source and restore customers while crews worked to fix the issue. However, due to the storm damage to our lines and BPA lines, PUD has temporarily lost the ability for that redundancy.
The Otter Radio station is also without power. We will keep you updated here and get you updates on the Otter as soon as we get back on the air.
