Outages due to transmission line work

Work on a transmission line caused a series of short power outages in the Libby area during the Christmas holiday, officials with Flathead Electric Cooperative said.

The Bonneville Power Administration undertook the work on the morning of Dec. 24, said Katie Pfennigs, community relations manager with Flathead Electric. They planned a short shutoff, lasting about a minute, to prepare for inclement weather, she said.

“It was just a real quick, one minute or so, outage and that was because they were doing some work to a transmission line that serves that area in anticipation of the upcoming cold snap,” Pfennigs said.

Subsequent brief outages in Libby over the following days were related to the same project, she said. The Cooperative had warning enough to alert customers ahead of time for a few of those incidents, but not all.

“We are able to send out calls about planned outages, but in some of these cases, we didn’t get enough warning to do that,” Pfennigs said.

The last outage related the project occurred Dec. 27, she said.