CEDAR CITY — A power outage affected thousands of customers in the Cedar City area on Wednesday morning.
Just after 7:35 a.m., Rocky Mountain Power’s website was showing 6,365 customers without power.
“They had a fault on the line, which is basically just a way of saying it tripped,” Rocky Mountain Power spokesperson Jona Whitesides told Cedar City News. “That specific line had about 6,000 customers on it.”
Electric workers were sent out to patrol the line to find the source of the problem.
“Depending on how long the line is and where it’s at, they will switch those circuits that are on that specific line onto another line,” Whitesides said, adding that the temporary load shift was able to successfully restore power to most of the affected customers.
Although most customers had their electricity restored within a half hour, some reportedly were without power for 60-90 minutes, he added.
“The cause is still unknown for that fault,” Whitesides said. “Sometimes, it can just be like a wind gust. It can be debris that can later fall off. They didn’t find anything, but they did patrol the line and found that it was clear, so then they went ahead and restored the power.”
The outage happened right before the start of the first day of school, causing some disruptions.
Iron County School District sent out an emergency text alert at 7:57 a.m. that read as follows:
Parents, we are aware of power outages scattered across the district. At this time, all schools will be in session. We will alert you if that changes. Transportation is also without power and phones, but buses are running as normal.
Shortly thereafter, the traffic lights in downtown Cedar City were seen to be working again. By 8:17 a.m., the number on Rocky Mountain Power’s outage map had decreased to 2,325 customers.
Shauna Lund, Iron County School District’s public information officer, said that power was back on at all of the district’s elementary schools before school started.
Although the electricity was reportedly still off at Canyon View High School until after 9 a.m, it did come back on a short time later.
At 9:29 a.m., the district sent out another notification that stated, “The power is back on at all ICSD schools. We want to extend a big welcome to all of our students who are back in the classroom. Have a great first day of school!”
Cedar City Police Sgt. Justin Ludlow said there were reports of traffic backups at various intersections throughout the city where the traffic lights weren’t working. However, there did not appear to be any reports of collisions resulting from the outage, he added.
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