Thousands without power Sunday night

Thousands of homes were without power Sunday night after winter storms hit the area hard, Northern Lights Inc. officials said, adding that crews worked tirelessly to restore electricity to Bonner County residents north of Ponderay.

Power outages are very common for Bonner County during winter storms, and engineering and operations manager Kristin Burge said crews were dealing with many issues due to the cold snap, followed by the freezing rain.

“These situations are generally caused by ice- or snow-loaded trees failing and making contact with our power lines,” she said. “These occurrences tend to be isolated and only impact a single or a handful of services, and result in an outage lasting a couple of hours.”

However, Burge said a much more significant outage happened Sunday evening, just before 5 p.m. The larger outage was caused by a powerline encased in ice that failed near Northern Lights’ substation in the Selle Valley.

“Because of the proximity of the failing line to our substation, it actually caused the protection on the substation itself to activate and open,” she said. “This resulted in a power outage that impacted about 2,100 cooperative members in the North Sandpoint and Selle Valley region.”

Both Northern Lights and Bonneville Power Administration crews were dispatched to restore power and repair the substation. Additionally, Burge said crews switched the impacted circuits to adjacent substations to bring affected residents back into service as quickly as possible while crews continued work on the damaged substation.

“The majority of services were restored within three hours and everyone impacted by the event was back in service by midnight,” she said.

All other outages reported over the weekend in Bonner County have also been restored, Burge said.