Grant PUD crews work through cold to restore power

Utility crews for Grant County PUD worked through the extreme weather last week as power outages affected their customers from Royal City to Grand Coulee.

With temperatures plunging to the well-below-zero range, then frozen rain falling across the region, the National Weather Service warned people to prepare for power outages.

One hit the Electric City-Grand Coulee area on Christmas night, apparently around 8 p.m. and took until morning to repair.

Customers on the PUD Facebook page asked for updates and expressed gratitude for crews working to restore power.

"Praying they can get it restored soon so we aren't cold!" commented Micki BearCub Hudson in Electric City.

The utility district posted on the page at 8:19 p.m. Dec. 25 that crews were on their way to determine a cause and restore power to about 800 customers here.

Updates were not forthcoming, but power was, at least before 9 a.m. when JoAnn Lyngholm thanked the PUD for getting it restored.

But that process isn't always straightforward, and people reported power coming on temporarily or not at all. One woman reported some damage to a garage door opener and a refrigerator, which she found not working when she got up Monday morning.

For PUD crews, the trouble has been ongoing since the cold weather started challenging the system in general last week, working on outages in the Royal City area and in Stratford, where they had to turn power off to get it restored.

Some reported outages in Lincoln County too, which became all too familiar with the damage ice weighing on powerlines and poles can do in an ice storm a few years ago.

Tips for getting the lights back on in an outage

"Our crews have been out working long, hard hours in this cold snap to keep the lights on and to restore power when we've had outages," a PUD post last Thursday began, asking customers to take certain precautions to help avoid longer outages:

1. If your power goes out, please check your main breaker to make sure that it has not tripped.

2. If your main breaker has not tripped, please call us at 1-800-216-5226 to report the outage. Please note, there are times when our phone system is overloaded during major outages. If the lights are out throughout your neighborhood and our phones are busy, we're likely aware of the outage. (Do not call 911 to report an outage, this will only tie up emergency services.)

3. During the outage, please turn off the breaker to your large-load appliances, these include water heaters, heat pumps, electric furnaces, and baseboard heaters and hot tubs. During very cold weather, having these appliances off will prevent a phenomenon known as Cold Load Pickup. If all of these appliances rush on at once after power is restored, it can cause a greater instantaneous demand for power than the system is designed for and could trip breakers and fuses in our power system, resulting in significant delays in our effort to restore power.

4. Until we restore power, follow the outage tips found at grantpud.org/outages.

5. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter for outage updates.

6. Once power is restored, please give it about 10 minutes before you turn on the breakers to your large load appliances. This will ensure that we avoid problems with Cold Load Pickup.