CEC repair crews restore power to Black Butte Ranch area

An animal crawling around a Central Electric Cooperative substation at Black Butte Ranch caused a short-circuit Monday afternoon that knocked out power for over two hours to about 1,800 members at the resort and nearby, officials said. It was the co-op’s second large outage of the day, after one in northeast Bend.

The short-circuit burned a key piece of switching equipment, leading to the entire substation going off-line about 3 p.m., said CEC Member Services Director Jeff Beaman. The type of animal was not known, though its fate was — it was a fatal encounter, Beaman confirmed.

The outage affected the resort community and areas such as Camp Sherman, Suttle Lake and Hoodoo, Beaman said.

Crews repaired damage to the key switching component and restored power about 5:20 p.m.

Beaman said the small animal had crawled around the substation’s buswork — the bars and wires that interconnect the major pieces of substation equipment, such as transformers and voltage regulators — and bridged a gap in an open switch. That connected two major areas of the substation that are remain disconnected from each other. The resulting voltage overload destroyed the switch, requiring its replacement.

The repair required crews to develop a temporary solution, he said, so another planned outage will need to be scheduled in the future to install a permanent switch. Beaman had no estimate for when that will take place, but said the co-op will be sure to communicate its plans in advance.

Earlier in the day, nearly 1,600 CEC members experienced a power outage of an hour to 90 minutes Monday morning that affected a wide area of northeast Bend, from medical offices to traffic signals.

A cable fault occurred in the area of the Holliday substation, triggering the outage around 7:30 a.m., officials said. About half the members had power back before 9 a.m. and the rest by about 9:15 a.m.

That outage affected nearly 1,600 CEC members in the area, according to its online map.

Beaman noted it had affected part of St. Charles Bend (which has generators for part of the facility) as well as the light at Northeast 27th and Neff Road. Members reported outages as far east as Eagle Road.

The utility posts outage reports and updates here: http://www.cec.coop/outage/