Cold Weather Keeping Tri-State Busy

In the News Observer this week cold weather dominates the county. The recent cold snap is being blamed for problems with electric service in the region. Polk County School students got a day off from school this week to allow electrical work to be performed at Copper Basin Elementary after the transformer bank at the school was overloaded early Monday morning.

When cold weather hit Monday, the 50 kilovolt transformers were not heavy enough to carry the load. Tri-State Electric General Manager reports. The existing transformers were replaced Tuesday with 75 kv transformers by a crew from Tri-state EMC. They are installing new transformers that will carry the load. There new transformers were installed Tuesday after approximately six hours of work and Copper Basin students returned to classes Wednesday. They were trying to get ahead of the other cold snap.

A section of Blue Ridge was struck with a power outage early Monday morning. They had extremely cold weather Monday which caused the system to be very heavily loaded. The power went out after a fault occurred at Tr-State EMC's Blue Ridge sub-station which in turn caused half of the sub-station's breakers to trip because he system was already so heavily loaded.

The restoration of power to individual customers took a bit of time due to an even heavier load being placed on the electric supply system once the sub-station problem was corrected. According to the manager, you have to bring it back on a piece at a time because everything it trying to come back on at once and that's a very heavy load for the system. Overall, approximately 2,500 to 3,000 customers were effected by Monday's outage which lasted approximately one hour. A small power outage occurred Tuesday in Blue Ridge, as of Thursday morning, only one small outage in the Mineral Bluff area was reported because of wintry weather which hit the region in the early hours of the day. Tri-State was unsure at the total amount of customers were out of power with this outage.