A weather related fire on a power pole at the Reid Gardner Generating Station near Moapa was believed to be the cause of the power outage that affected all of Lincoln County and much of southeast Clark County Monday morning.
NV Energy reported the outage occurred about 7:45 a.m.
However, Lincoln County Power District General Manager Dave Luttrell said although NV Energy was reporting the outage about 7:45 a.m., power to Lincoln County went out at 7:59 a.m.
Luttrell said it is believed it was a lighting strike from the overnight rainstorm that passed through the area early Monday morning, and set a power pole on fire at the Reid Gardner station. “It probably didn’t burst into flames immediately, but burned slowly, unnoticed, until the pole fell apart and snapped the line..”
Power was also knocked out to NV Energy customers in Mesquite, Logandale, Overton and Bunkerville for most of the day and was not fully restored to all customers until about 9:30 Monday evening.
The Regional Transportation Commission reported the outage knocked out power to residential and business customers in all towns along a stretch of Interstate 5 to Mesquite and along U.S. Highway 93 and State Route 318 to the White Pine County line and on SR 375 to Rachel.
For Lincoln County though, Luttrell said what LCPD was able to do quickly was “once we were able to sort out what was going on because it didn’t occur on our system, we realized it would be quite awhile before NV Energy could make repairs, and we arranged to switch to our backup feed, which is the old 69kv transmission line that comes from Hoover Dam, and thus were able to restore Lincoln County in just a few hours.”
Luttrell said he appreciated “the cooperation and understanding we got from our customers. As soon as we were able to sort out the problem and given the multiple parties involved with NV Energy to get accurate information from them, talk to Alamo Power, Pioche Public Utilities and the City of Caliente, and put in place a plan to switch to the backup system.”
Luttrell added, “What was good for me was the response from the public which was pretty positive and very understanding. I was very pleased with that.”
