Faulty insulator causes power outage for 30,000 in Upper Valley

Nearly 30,000 customers in the upper valley were without power for several hours Sunday morning. Rocky Mountain Power personnel indicated the outage was caused by a faulty insulator located on the 161 line feeding the Rigby area.

The outage occurred at 9:37 a.m. Sunday morning to 29,561 Rocky Mountain Power customers in the following towns and areas: Rigby, Rexburg, Ashton, Menon, Egin, Newdale, Ririe, Roberts, Smith South Fork, St. Anthony, Sugar City, Targhee, Thornton and Ucon.

Fall River crews were immediately dispatched, but were unable to restore power to the sub-stations until Rocky Mountain could repair the 161 transmission line feeding the stations.

Restoration to customers occurred in steps.

Rigby restored at 11:07 a.m.
Smith at 11:12 a.m.
South Fork, Ririe, Ucon and Roberts restored at 11:13 a.m.
Egin restored at 11:14 a.m.
Rexburg and Thornton restored at 12:03 p.m.
All customers restored at 12:07 p.m.

A second outage had affected more than 400 customers in the Rigby and Menan areas. At 4:10 p.m., customers there told our station power had not yet been restored.

Rocky Mountain Power spokeswoman Margaret Oler said the outage started at 12:34 p.m. and affected 409 customers. A patrolman was looking for the source of the problem at 4:22 p.m.