Iberian Rug Company Facebook page/Photo courtesy
Businesses and residents throughout the valley are still feeling the effects of last week’s power outage.
Heather Isberian, CFO of Isberian Rug Company, discovered that half of the lights in her store were not working after Friday’s power outage.
She wondered if it was a problem with the store, the building or the landlord.
It turned out that none of the above was true.
After several electricians came to her shop in Willits yesterday to determine the cause of the problem, one of them figured it out.
The electrician, who asked not to be identified for fear of losing business, said Friday’s incident involved a particular component burning out in most of the lights in the store. He discovered this by comparing a working light with a non-working light.
“I feel like there was a much larger power outage, and we can’t pinpoint the exact cause,” Isberian said. “And so he came up with the idea that this is the component that might have blown in what happened on Friday. That’s actually a good name, Friday. That’s where we blew.”
Now she has to replace that component in all the lamps that aren’t working, which will take time and cost an unknown amount. And once they’re installed, there’s no guarantee the lamps will work.
Until then, half of her Willits store is in the dark, and Isberian is concerned that this could impact business. A designer who has worked with Isberian Rugs before also came into the store yesterday, and Isberian said the designer could barely see what she was looking at on the plan table because it was so dark.
Zander Yeiser, a property manager for the mid-valley Romero Group, which manages the building where Isberian Rugs is located, has also had problems at three buildings under his jurisdiction.
“I can tell you that the costs of the associations I manage are quite large,” he said.
The anonymous electrician has an idea what might have happened on Friday to cause these problems in the valley. He suspects that there are three phases of three wires in the valley’s power grid that have electrical pressure, and that two of the three phases failed or lost power. Based on the data the electrician collected, the phases did not go all the way to 0% power, but possibly around 40%.
If the phases dropped to 0% power, power-consuming appliances like lights, TVs, and refrigerators would simply turn off. However, because the power dropped to 40% for a long period of time, the appliances did not have enough voltage. Because of this, the power increases and the appliances try to use more power to produce the same performance as they would at 100% power.
In this case, the objects overheat, their interior melts and sometimes catches fire.
“I came in today from another insurance claim where they said, ‘We lost our refrigerator, we lost our lights, we lost our hot tub,'” said the electrician, who has never experienced anything like this before. “I’ve been getting nonstop calls like this since Friday afternoon.”
The power outage, reported from Aspen to Basalt, occurred around 1 p.m., according to a Pitkin County alert.
“From what I understand, this power outage is due to the Xcel Energy transformer,” said Basalt City Manager Ryan Mahoney. “Holy Cross Energy is our direct utility, but they buy power from Xcel. So they take power from the grid and convert it into our regional power. There’s a transformer somewhere, I don’t know the exact location, but that was one from Xcel Energy.”
When asked, however, Michelle Aguayo, Xcel Energy’s Colorado media representative, said that Xcel does not supply Basalt. The only place in the valley that Xcel supplies is Carbondale.
“We supply power to other companies wholesale, but that would not cause an outage at the distribution level,” she said. “In this case, we would sell power to Holy Cross, and then they distribute it to their customers. And since they are their customers, we have no control over that. We basically send the power to them through transmission lines, and then they take it from there.”
Jenna Weatherred, vice president of member and community relations at Holy Cross Energy, said, “We experienced a transmission incident, and the lines that actually caused the problem are Xcel’s.”
When Weatherred heard what Xcel had said, she said, “You can’t be serious.”
“Ultimately, some of it comes from Xcel, and some of it we buy from different places,” she said. “But we use Xcel’s transmission lines. We pay them what’s called a transit fee to get the power to us.”
When the transmission lines owned by Xcel failed, the businesses and homes managed by Holy Cross were left without power.
When this information was reported back to Xcel, Aguayo said, “I just wanted to confirm that we did indeed have a transmission incident that impacted Basalt.”
Reach Regan Mertz at 970-429-9153 or [email protected].
