Truckee, Calif. January 9, 2017 – The greater Truckee community has been responding to a series of severe winter storms that have caused power outages, traffic delays, school closures, falling trees and flooding. This latest series of storms started over a week ago and are predicted to continue until at least Thursday, Jan. 12.
Truckee Donner Public Utility District’s (TDPUD) electric crews have been working day and night to restore power as quickly as possible and to keep our community safe. The main causes of power outages and transients have been frozen snow on power lines, falling trees and limbs, and NV Energy transmission outages. TDPUD crews have been able to minimize outage times by isolating the cause of the outage and using switching gear to restore power from other parts of the electric distribution system.
“Truckee Donner PUD’s electric crews have made heroic efforts to restore power to our customers while working in very harsh conditions,” said TDPUD general manager Michael Holley. “The electric outages would have been even worse had the TDPUD not made significant investments in our electric distribution system reliability through tree-trimming and state-of-the-art protection equipment.”
TDPUD began experiencing outages on Wednesday, Jan 4, when 4,837 customers (out of 13,249) were out of power with an average outage time of a little over two hours. On Sunday, Jan.8, there were 6,569 customers out of power with an average outage time of a little over 40 minutes. During this period, TDPUD responded to 1,231 outage calls from customers regarding 122 total outage incidents.
Thanks to the valiant efforts of the electric crews, TDPUD was able to restore power to all customers by Monday morning, Jan. 9. There is another series of wet, windy storms forecast for this week and TDPUD reminds everyone to be safe and prepared.