LUB Recaps Another Storm and Outages

Northern Dome Facing South

Lamar Light Plant Superintendent, Houssin Hourieh, briefed the Utilities Board on power outages that occurred on Wednesday, March 13^th in the Lamar service area.

The report read that at about 12:00am on Wednesday, March 13^th, the LAMSO substation tripped off-line due to a bus differential fault which was caused by a failed voltage transformer.  The crew replaced the VT and power was restored at 2:40am.  The unit was installed at the top of a power pole and according to Hourieh the device exploded into several metal chunks which were found at the pole’s base.  The main unit was still bolted to the pole.  He told the board that moisture entering through cracks in the material can cause a fault of this nature.

Wide spread outages occurred during the severe wind storm that swept through southeast Colorado later that afternoon. The majority of the outages were due to tree limbs on secondary services to homes.  However our primary lines were affected as well.  On the 69KV line we lost an “H” structure at CR 6 and Hwy 50 and nine poles in Bent County on CR JJ and 30.

On the 25KV system we lost one pole on the east end by West farms, two poles at CR LL and 12. McClave was out of power for approximately 4.5 hours due to a fallen cottonwood tree that damaged a riser pole structure to an underground system at CR1 and Hwy 196.  In town, on the 4KV system, we lost three poles located at Washington and 10^th, Beech and 7^th and Beech and 13^th Street.  We also lost three service poles.  Crews worked through the late hours isolating faulted areas and restoring power to our customers.

Hourieh noted that the poles along the 100 to 200 blocks of South 7^th and 8^th street will be repaired Wednesday morning, March 27^th beginning at 8am.  Board members are expecting to meet with solar power customers Wednesday afternoon and representatives from Prowers Economic Prosperity at 2pm.

By Russ Baldwin