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Show Power problems combine to put county in the dark By MARC HADDOCK A combination of weather-related problems left most of Utah County without power Monday night, but American Fork and Cedar Valley were hardest hit in the outage. Most of American Fork was left powerless for over an hour following a fire on a Provo City power structure that blacked out up to 70 percent of the power users in the county. "The big outages lasted between . an hour and an hour-and-a-half," said John Ward, spokesman for Utah Power & Light. Cedar Fort and Fairfield were affected even longer, with Fairfield residents spending the night with no power until 7 a.m. Cedar Fort residents had their power restored around 4 a.m. Ward said the power problems started just before 10 p.m. when a fire on three-pole structure near the Hale Substation in the mouth of Provo Canyon burned a control wire. That, in turn, disabled a circuit braker in the substation - causing two other circuit breakers to shut down as well. That caused circuit breakers in UP&L's Highland and Nebo substations sub-stations to shut down as well. "Altogether we dropped about 70 percent of the UP&L customers in Utah County," Ward said. "It was kind of an odd situation, because the rest of our system didn't get too bad of a storm." While most UP&L customers saw their power restored within a few minutes, American Fork and Cedar Valley were troubled by additional weather-related problems. "At the same time as the fire, we had a batch of local distribution problems in the American Fork area," Ward said. "Mostly it was just the wind blowing on the right frequency to knock the power lines together." But Ward said efforts to pinpoint those problems were hampered by the trouble at the Hale Substation and the timing of the outage. "In many cases folks were asleep and we didn't find out where the small problems were until people woke up this morning," Ward said. Cedar Valley was further plagued by a fault on the transmission line from Lindon to Saratoga which had still not been found at press time. Ward said the power company had patched around the fault to restore power to Cedar Valley Tuesday morning. |