Almost 30,000 suffer morning power outage Posted on May 01, 2001

A glitch in a major transmission line coming into northern Colorado knocked out power to about 30,000 Xcel Power Co. Customers in western Weld County for about two hours Monday morning.

The outage affected customers from Johnstown to Kersey and from Greeley to Nunn, said Steve Roalstad, Xcel spokesman, but the biggest problem was from Johnstown-Milliken to Berthoud.

“The other areas were without power for about 10 minutes, but those in the Johnstown-Milliken area were out about two hours before we could track down the problem,” Roalstad said.

The power went out about 6:30 a.m. Because school officials did not know how long power would be out, classes at Roosevelt High School and at the middle school were canceled for the day. Elementary schools in the district did not have classes because an in-service day already was scheduled.

Roalstad said the problem was with a Western Area Power Authority transmission line that comes into Weld from Beaver Creek. A breaker failed on that line, which resulted in a domino effect on smaller electrical lines. The problem was confounded when a breaker at a Johnstown substation failed to reset.

“It took us about two hours to find that problem and reset that breaker manually,” Roalstad said.

The problem is not one that should repeat itself this spring and summer and is unlike power problems in California, he said.

“We have a sufficient supply of power, unlike California, and the means to deliver that power,” Roalstad said. “We may have a failure every now and then, like we had this morning, but we certainly do not anticipate any rolling blackouts happening in Colorado this summer.”

Story by Bill Jackson / Greeley Tribune

http://www.greeleytrib.com/article.php?sid=1344

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), May 01, 2001