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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Archives Revels Classifieds Real Estate Menu Guide Wedding Weather Subscribe Contact Us October 26, 2005 City has no power over recent outages By Alan Panebaker Tidings Correspondent Journeyman linemen Rick Barton (left) and Mike Millette (right) connect wires to a main feeder that will eventually bring electricity to a new subdivision through underground cables. Alan Panebaker | Ashland Daily Tidings With 17 power outages reported in the city of Ashland between Sept. 2 and Oct. 12, some local residents are skeptical of their power service, while the electric department wishes people would learn more about the complexity of the situation before complaining. Of the recent outages, the longest was seven hours on the afternoon of Sept. 2. While some outages, usually partial ones, are caused by problems within the city, officials with the Ashland Electric Department said a lot of outages in Ashland that happen are beyond city workers’ control. The culprit, according to Ashland Electric Department Director Dick Wanderscheid, usually seems to lie outside the city limits. Of the two citywide power outages that have affected Ashland since the beginning of September, one was caused by a car accident in Medford. The other most likely by a bird or animal that flew into a power line near the California border, then cleared itself before authorities arrived. But some residents remain frustrated, simply because of the frequency with which the power goes out in Ashland, regardless of the circumstances. Connie Battaile, a retired librarian who has lived in the Rogue Valley since 1962, said she doesn’t see how the City of Ashland can consider itself a high-tech fiber network provider when it has a hard time keeping the lights on. “I think it’s possible to try and play in the big leagues without trying to do their homework first,” Battaile said. “I think that’s what they’re trying to do.” Battaile’s late husband was on an oxygen machine before he died, and every time the power went out, the electric-powered concentrator on his machine would stop working. The machine that stopped working would normally make a beeping sound when the oxygen concentration was low, but without electricity, it was silent. “It wasn’t critical for him because he wasn’t sleeping when the power went out,” Battaile said. “But I keep wondering about other people.” Andy Boesl, marketing manager for Apria Healthcare (the company that made Battaile’s husband’s oxygen machine), said his company has an emergency preparedness plan for things like natural disasters and power outages. This plan includes a phone tree so that the company can contact all of its clients or go to their homes, Boesl said. “We have a map of customers that shows where everyone is,” Boesl said. But like other Ashland residents, Battaile said she is just trying to figure out why the power always seems to be going out in her town. Behind the switch Most of Ashland’s electricity comes from Pacific Power and is distributed through three substations in town. This power is spread all over town and to transformers that modify the power voltage and decrease it so it is low enough voltage for in-home use. All of the 115 kilovolts that Pacific Power provides to the city of Ashland first go through the Oak Knoll substation and into three feeders that also send electricity to the Mountain and Ashland substations. The Bonneville Power Administration owns the northern line and Mountain substation that serves Ashland with 69 kilovolts. Ashland Electric is trying to upgrade this line so it can compensate for the southern Pacific Power line if that one goes out, Wanderscheid said. “It’s amazing to me the lights are on as much as they are,” Wanderscheid said. “If people knew how much went into it when they flip the switch, they’d be more appreciative.” Wanderscheid said he is also trying to implement a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition System that would allow the department to pinpoint exactly where the power lines have been affected. This system would save a few minutes in reconnecting the power instead of just sending crews out to search a general area. This advanced system would monitor how much power is flowing through certain transformers and shift the amount of energy to keep things balanced. The electric department would most likely pay the $100,000 to $300,000 it would cost to implement the system through increased electric rates, an internal loan or revenue bonds. As for the local outages where a certain neighborhood loses power but one directly next to it does not, these are usually caused by failing transformers. “Typically, this time of year, [outages] are caused by squirrels climbing on top of transformers,” Wanderscheid said. ‘I don’t know’ While putting more and more electric cables underground and covering transformers helps alleviate some of these outages, it can create problems of its own. “The problem with a cable underground,” said Scott Johnson, the operations superintendent for the electric department, “is if it goes out, can you see it?” Johnson is one of the people who get a plethora of phone calls when the power goes out. “The worst part about outages is that everyone calls in wanting to know when it’s coming back on,” Johnson said. “‘I don’t know’ is a hard answer to handle.” While Johnson is searching for a palatable answer to tell his irate customers, Monte Mendenhall with Pacific Power is usually out patroling the power lines looking for what caused the outage. According to Mendenhall’s numbers, customers who get their electricity from the Oak Knoll substation went seven hours without electricity from Pacific Power in the last 12 months, while those from the Ashland substation went 5.4 hours in the last 12 months. This was slightly better than the Jackson County average of outage time in the last year of 7.1 hours. Pacific Power also measures percentages of time that power remains on in the last 12 months. Jackson County had a worse record than the average for the state, with power on 99.92 percent of the time. Oregon Pacific Power customers averaged 99.97 percent statewide in the last year. Any time is a bad time While seven hours without power seems like a small amount, for some businesses, a half hour of outage time can ruin the day. Pryce Costington of Geppetto’s restaurant said the business where he waits tables has a short window of business when the power goes out before they have to close up shop. Their protocol in the event of a power outage usually starts with not opening the walk-in refrigerator. “We have a hood vent system that’s electric,” Costington said. “It gets unbearably hot in 10 minutes behind the line, and it spreads into the dining room.” While Geppetto’s has the luxury of a manual cash register option and an old manual credit card machine, Costington said, “The short and long of it is if it’s more that 20 minutes, we have to stop bringing in new customers.” And while places like Ashland Community Hospital and the fire department have reserve battery supplies, some offices are left in the dark when the power goes out. At Hamid Ghavam’s dental office in Ashland, patients had to pack up and move to their Talent office in an outage in the last few weeks, according to dental hygienist Kirsten Hammerickson. “We did have patients, and we just had to move them to the Talent office with us,” Hammerickson said. And while dental patients may be left with their mouths open for a while when there isn’t any electricity, people stashing their money in Ashland usually don’t have many problems — save for not being able to use ATMs. “We’ll lose our connection from time to time,” said Joe Danelson, regional president for US Bank. “But it’s never been a huge problem.” In the worst-case scenario that someone is making a transaction at the moment the power goes out, Danelson said, his bank can do a written receipt and finish the transaction when the computers get back on line. Since banks are computer-oriented, they all usually shut down when the power goes out, but there are generally no lost transactions or serious glitches. The general readiness and plan for everyone in Ashland seems to be about the same when the power goes out, and fire captain Walt Anders described the fire protocol simply. “We just wait and see what happens,” Anders said. 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