LONGVIEW — Outside of storms, the main reason for power outages this year was equipment failure, according to a recent report from the Cowlitz Public Utility District.
A report tracking outages from August 2022 through this September has shown that storms over the last year were the main reason for outages, but without them, equipment failure made up the majority of lost power. Weather caused 1.9 million minutes of power loss, while equipment failure accounted for 1.4 million of the total lost minutes.
The report shows there were 4.6 million interrupted minutes between August 2022 and Sept. 30 with a total of 475 outages and about 36,000 impacted customers across Cowlitz County. Other reasons for outages included animals and humans.
The top three outages happened Sept. 25 and Sept. 27, all caused by windstorms. One of these storms on Sept. 27 lasted seven-and-a-half hours, impacting about 300 customers. The second-longest outage this year was Sept. 25, with the report showing it last about six hours and affected 126 customers.
Exclusive of storms, the substation in Vader caused more than 140,000 interrupted minutes this September, according to the PUD’s report. The Pacific Way substation caused roughly 75,000 minutes of power loss.
But over the course of the last 11 months, the substation in Ariel caused the highest amount of interrupted minutes with about 950,000 total lost minutes. The Lewis River substation caused nearly the same amount of power loss, according to the report.
Overall, the PUD served about 1,000 fewer customers in September compared to the previous months, which the report attributes to four fewer business days in the month.
July saw the highest number of disconnects this year, but total actual disconnects went down slightly between August and September. Total customer payments went down by about 5,000 during September, but the number of payments has remained largely the same over the last year.
About $6.3 million was spent on line crew capital work, 46% of which was regular maintenance and 18.2% of which was customer service. With capital work on substations, the PUD spent about $1.6 million to maintain and repair some of its equipment. Of that, about $1 million was spent to rebuild the Hansen substation.
