Bend off-and-on power outage hits 12,000

An off-and-on power outage affected more than 12,000 Pacific Power customers in the Bend-Redmond area Friday morning, a utility spokesman said.

The outage occurred around 10:45 a.m. and was related to a “transmission issue” between Bend and Redmond, spokesman Tom Gauntt said.

It affected 12,229 Pacific Power customers in an area from north of downtown Bend to the city’s north end and north along Highway 97, including a few Redmond addresses, Gauntt said.

The power came back on for about a minute shortly before 11 a.m., but went out again about a minute later and then was restored once again within a few minutes.

Gauntt said that likely had to do with Pacific Power crews rerouting power transmission to isolate the issue and bring most people back online.

He also said it was unrelated to maintenance work involving 10 customers on the south end of Bend, visible on the utility’s Oregon outage map.

We’ll have more details as avaialble.