News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
Gusty winds toppled trees through electric lines on Christmas day, knocking power out in Sisters and portions of the surrounding area and interrupting many a Christmas dinner.
According to Central Electric Co-op's member services director Jim Crowell, the major outages began at about 4 p.m., when a tree went down through a line in the area of Ash and Jefferson streets.
"That caused a breaker to open and apparently knocked out most of downtown Sisters," Crowell said.
Before that, at 1:30 p.m., a problem with a lightning arrestor caused an isolated outage in Camp Sherman, Crowell reported.
According to Crowell, eight CEC personnel in two-man crews scrambled to deal with the downed line. They might have got Sisters' power back up quickly, Crowell said, but they had to respond to yet another downed line near Oregon Log Homes at 5:15 p.m.
That incident closed the highway, and all eight CEC linemen and supervisors converged to control the situation. Then a crew had to head to the Cloverdale area to deal with another downed line at 7 p.m.
"We were shifting those two-man crews from Sisters to Camp Sherman to Cloverdale all afternoon and evening," Crowell said.
CEC was still compiling information on the outages as The Nugget went to press. Crowell said that power was restored to the area by 10:15 p.m.; he did not have information on how many accounts were affected.
The outages interrupted holiday dinners and enforced a candle-light Christmas for CEC customers. And the CEC linemen really had their holiday interrupted.
"That's a tough case," Crowell said, "because in this case they were just sitting down or in the middle of Christmas dinner."
But the electricity provider never has trouble turning out a crew to deal with emergencies.
"They're very good about responding to stuff," Crowell said.
He noted that two of the December 25 crew - the father-son team of Gus and Jon Paxton - weren't even on the stand-by list for an emergency. Still, they responded from Jon's home in Plainview to help out.
The crews are paid overtime, Crowell acknowledged, but that seems less of a motivator than the compulsion to get the job done. He said that in major multiple-day incidents, supervisors often have to order crews to go home to rest. They don't like to leave before the work is done, Crowell said.
"They go out and bust their hump because they understand that people need power," he said. "They're a pretty dedicated bunch."
Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.
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