Enough already! Power outages during storms rankle Utahns

Marc Ballard finally had power restored at his Cottonwood Heights home shortly before noon on Monday — more than 72 hours after it flickered off in Friday's massive snowstorm.

He and his family relied on a wood stove to stay warm and a generator to power its electric blower. "We were able to maintain about 60 degrees," Ballard said. He, his wife and his 18-year-old daughter slept in the family room under "every blanket we own."

Weather-wise, there's good news and bad news for the Ballards and thousands of other Wasatch Front residents. The good news: Snow is expected to taper off today. The bad news: It is expected to hit hard again either late New Year's Day or early Friday. (See story on Page B2.)

Ballard credits the family's camping skills for getting them through their three-day power-outage ordeal, which began about 4 a.m. Friday. But he said Utah Power could have handled the situation better. "We're not getting the type of service we used to," Ballard said, describing the trouble he had getting through to the power company.

"I'm not disgruntled at all with the Utah Power employees. I went to talk to the linemen today, to tell them, 'I appreciate you guys,' " he said, blaming

instead what he called the company's overly profit-conscious leadership.

Complaints from Ballard and thousands of other customers who lost power when the storm slammed into the state early Friday are apparently being heard.

On Monday, the top official of PacifiCorp, which operates as Utah Power in Utah, flew into Salt Lake City from the company's Portland headquarters to address the concern raised by outages that left 70,000 customers in the area without electricity and resulted in 1 million service interruptions.

"This is not an instance of equipment failure," Judi Johansen, president and chief executive of PacifiCorp, said. "This is an instance where Mother Nature has come in and dumped some extremely wet snow on our power grid and has caused these problems."

Compounding the problems was PacifiCorp's new automated outage management system, used to track power failures. Ballard was just one of many customers who had trouble reporting an outage.

By Saturday, the company had abandoned the software after it became apparent it was not working properly.