Tens of thousands of Clark County residents lost power late Monday, and some of the outages continued on Tuesday as Clark Public Utilities scrambled to keep pace with downed power lines and other damage caused by heavy winds.
Clark Public Utilities media specialist Dameon Pesanti described it as an all-hands-on-deck situation.
“North and east county were the hardest hit,” he said, due to the greater tree density in those parts of the county.
The outages peaked late Monday night with approximately 31,000 customers without power, according to Pesanti, although power was restored relatively quickly for about 18,000 of them.
For comparison, the brutal winter storm that walloped the Portland region in January 2017 resulted in a total of 278 outages affecting almost 73,000 customers, according to a Columbian story at the time.
The utility offers an updated outage map on its website, https://www.clarkpublicutilities.com/outages-safety/.
The current round of outages stands out more for the unusually severe fire risk than the total number of affected customers, Pesanti said. In the current weather conditions, it’s all too easy for a downed power line to spark a wildfire.
Clark Public Utilities deployed nine first responder crews to work on restoration efforts, along with six construction crews to make repairs, assisted by six tree crews and three contract construction crews. There were also two water and fire trailers assigned to the crews in high-fire-risk areas, Pesanti said.
When outages pile up during storm situations, Clark Public Utilities takes a triage approach and prioritizes repairs to bigger infrastructure like transmission lines and substations in order to restore power to the greatest number of customers as fast as possible, Pesanti said. Customers “at the end of the line” who were cut off by smaller local disruptions may have to wait a bit longer.
The number of customers without power fell to about 5,800 as of 7 a.m. Tuesday morning and down to about 3,800 as of noon. But while the worst of the smoky air had abated by the morning, the high winds persisted on Tuesday and created ongoing challenges and a scattering of further outages.
All available personnel were expected to continue working through the afternoon and evening, Pesanti said, although some employees will be sent home for rest.
