Brr! Big Blackout Blamed on Bad Equipment During Extreme Montana Cold
Flathead Electric Cooperative managers are now saying it was a switch on the regional power network that failed yesterday, leaving hundreds of people without electricity during the bitter cold.
The outage couldn't have come at a worse time for several hundred customers, right when temperatures had dropped to about 30 below zero during one of the coldest Montana mornings in several years.
Bonneville Power Administration, which provides wholesale power to the Flathead, had received an alarm from the Kalispell substation and needed a reset to restore remote operations. BPA coordinated with Flathead Electric and believed it would only take a short, ten-second emergency outage to switch to a backup system. But then that backup system also failed, knocking off a sizable 35 megawatts of power.
That knocked out residents from southeast of Kalispell all the way into the Swan Valley. Crews had to work in the cold through the day and into the evening, which people did their best to cope and some emergency shelters came online.
One of the challenges was restoring power in sections to account for the "cold load" where large amounts of heaters and other appliances put increased demand on the system and can trigger a wider outage.
The outage came just a couple of days after another outage had hit areas around Lakeside.
It was also a cold evening for some Northwestern Energy gas customers on the north side of Stevensville when natural gas service was interrupted in the late afternoon for a few hours.
MORE: Resources to prepare for power outages in the Flathead