More than 5,000 residents and businesses from Waldport to Yachats lost power Friday after a broken insulator caused lines to collapse.
The power went out about 9 a.m. Friday and was not restored entirely until 3 p.m., although the majority of affected Central Lincoln Peoples Utility District customers had power restored by 10:15 a.m.
“Basically, what caused the outage is we had a transmission insulator break,” said Mark Freeman, director of employee, customer and community services for Central Lincoln.
Central Lincoln determined Monday afternoon that the “corrosive environment, which wreaks havoc on stuff” was responsible for the break, which occurred on South Crestline Drive near Southwest Dahl Avenue in Waldport.
The broken insulator led to a chain reaction. The transmission line the insulator was on fell into another transmission line below it, breaking the crossarm that transmission line was on and then both of those transmission lines fell into the distribution lines.
“But it was basically the insulator failure, which caused the crossarm failure, which then fell into the distribution and then that tripped everything off,” Freeman said.
Waldport residents were the longest without power. Some Yachats’ residents reported the power coming back on then going off again before finally coming back online for good. That is because the power company first repairs the line to bring back electricity to the “critical mass the outage affected,” but then may have to shut it off again to make further repairs in order to bring the remaining customers back online.
— Garret Jaros, YachatsNews
