Power outages strike Wasatch Front

Utah Power crews were busy Tuesday afternoon fixing power outages that affected four counties and more than 88,000 customers.

The first outage happened just before 11 a.m. in Ogden. A substation at the mouth of Ogden Canyon detected a fault on some electrical equipment, Utah Power spokesman Dave Eskelsen said.

The fault caused protective devices to activate and power was cut to other substations. The result was 42,500 customers in Ogden and southern Box Elder County without power, he said.

The equipment with the problem was isolated and power was restored to the substations about an hour later with power being fully restored to customers by 1 p.m.

Just as that problem was being fixed, a second unrelated outage occurred in Salt Lake County.

At 12:08 p.m. the Oquirrh substation detected an overload in the transmission system throughout the Salt Lake Valley. Again, Eskelsen said the protective devices that were in place cut power to most of the south end of Salt Lake County and parts of northern Utah County.

About 46,000 customers were affected in that outage, Eskelsen said. Power was restored by 1 p.m.

That outage was caused when one transmission line in South Jordan was taken out of service for maintenance and a second section of that system was taken out of service at another location to allow a crane from a construction crew to work safely near the power line, Eskelsen said.

The rest of the system became overloaded once those two lines were taken out of service.

The good news was both outages were fixed within an hour, Eskelsen said. Utah Power will conduct inquiries into both incidents to better understand what happened and improve performance in the future, he said.

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