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Show Black Out Hits Twice Slows Election Tally Adding to the excitement of election night in Park City Tuesday was an extensive Blackout Black-out that plunged most of the town into darkness at one time or anofher, the third black-out and second prolonged power failure to hit the area in the last week. City Treasurer Bruce Decker reported that vote-counting was delayed about an hour in districts 1, 2 and 9, and election judges in district 1 were forced to count votes by candlelight and flashlight flash-light to complete their tallies. Most of town north of Main Street reportedly lost power at approximately 9 p.m., with the downtown area experiencing brief black-outs and returns to power between 9:45 and 10:00 p.m. Almost exactly one week before, the northern end of town was blacked-out for two hours Tuesday between 6:30 and 8:30 p.m." Although no immediate explanation expla-nation of the most recent power failure was available at press time, UP and L District Representative Represen-tative Wayne Bruening told the Record last week the original power failure was caused by a "malfunction in a switching mechanism." Bruening said the local crew initially suspected a downed power line in the area and spent most of the two hours of the power outage patrolling the line for a break. When they could find nothing wrong with the line, they moved the circuit covering the area to another switch and power returned. return-ed. . The blacked-out area included all of the Holiday Ranch, Park Meadows and Thaynes Canyon residential area, lower Park Avenue as far south as the 7-11 store, and the area between Park City and Interstate 80 along state highway 224, including Snyder-ville Snyder-ville and Kimball's Junction. Park City's downtown area and condominiums were not affected, although many residents -of the northern end of town came to Main Street until power was restored. Main Street's Red Banjo pizza parlor reportedly ran out of cheese and was forced to close because of the influx of business. Two nights later, on Thursday, power went out again for 5 or 10 minutes, causing Mayor Leon Uriarte to be called away from a city council meeting to attend to problems at Park City High School, where he is chief custodian. According to Bruening, the second black-out came as a result of an overload on the switch that was forced to handle two circuits after Tuesday's power failure. The overload caused the switch to automatically shut down, but when power was turned on again manually, the switch held up and no further problems were reported report-ed until election night.. |