Power and portable phones go out at BBR

Power outages are not unusual in the Sisters area, but one on Monday, June 16, coincided with a rash of residential telephone failures.

That caused consternation not only for the residents of Black Butte Ranch, where the dual problem occurred, but for Qwest Telephone Company officials, Central Electric Co-op engineers, and even the management and emergency service personnel at Black Butte Ranch.

Why did the phones go out when the power went off?

Stacey Dahl, public information officer for Qwest, said that the phone company has its own power for operating residential telephones, "sending low wattage power down the telephone lines so that when there is a major power outage, our phones are not affected. They still operate," she said.

Dahl said that she had no explanation, nor did their service people, for what happened in the Sisters/Black Butte Ranch area.

Susanna Klosterman, spokesperson for the Black Butte Police Department, said that their backup generator went on automatically, "when the power went out. We had all our services working," she said.

"Of course, we had the battery operated radios in our police cars and our cell phones. We were always in contact with the 911 services so we were still able to cover any emergency."

One of the tangent circumstances occurring with the power failure was that the electric gates to the residential area of Black Butte Ranch became inoperable and cars were backed up waiting to get in until maintenance personnel physically removed the barriers many minutes after the power failure.

This opened the gated community to any and all who wanted to enter, voiding the normal security system.

Sharon Sowa, Administrative Assistant at the Black Butte Ranch Fire Department, said the department has emergency backup and was "never out of touch with anyone needing service. Our generators and back-up batteries worked fine," she said.

But what about those residents who lost telephone service? How did that happen? The answer was elusive. What would those residents without phone service have done if they needed emergency help, even if the emergency agencies were operating?

The answer came from a staff member at Central Electric Cooperative.

"We knew we were down at Black Butte Ranch from 3:30 in the afternoon to 7:15 that night," said Jim Crowell, member services director of CEC.

"But what we couldn't figure is why our power outage had anything to do with the phones going out," he said.

In talking about this mystery among staff members at the power company, one person suggested that if the phones in question were the "walk-around kind," the cradle or base of the phone unit would be powered by CEC through a wall plug and when the power went out, the base, which acts as a radio receiver, would be shut off.

"With so many homes now having walk-around telephones," Crowell said, "without house power there would be no receiver to which the portable phone could send it's single. Without power to the base, the phone won't work."

That was the reason so many homes lost phone service when they lost power service. Most homes in and around Black Butte Ranch now have multiple, portable telephones. It apparently had nothing to do with the telephone company.

A solution to this relatively new condition of house powered telephones came from Jack Croll, former head of the Black Butte Ranch Police Board: "Every home should have at least one hard-lined phone. That is, a non-portable unit plugged directly into the phone line, or a cell phone that operates without external power just in case of an emergency during a power outage," he said.