Fatal wreck takes down power in Sisters

A driver headed eastbound on Highway 126 at about 3:30 a.m. on Friday veered across the road and slammed into a power pole carrying a 115kv power transmission line.

The impact sheared the pole of at its base and took down power across a wide swath of the Sisters Country.

Deschutes County Sheriff's Office deputies and personnel from the Cloverdale Fire District responded to the scene near Hurtley Ranch Road and found the 2003 Ford Escape fully engulfed in flames. Personnel from the Cloverdale Fire District extinguished the fire. A single occupant was discovered dead inside the vehicle. He has been identified as William David Huxel, Jr., 46, of Bend.

Highway 126 was closed for several hours during the investigation of the crash and traffic was detoured around the area by crews from the Oregon Department of Transportation.

Approximately 4,400 homes and businesses in Sisters, Indian Ford, Aspen Lakes and portions of Plainview, and in the Eagle Ridge subdivision west of Cline Falls Road near Redmond, lost power. Tollgate, Crossroads and points west are not on that 115kv line and residents there did not lose power. (See related story, page 16.)

Central Electric Cooperative crews could not access the site until 8 a.m. when sheriff's office investigators cleared the site. That meant that much of the area was shut down all morning.

"CEC line crews replaced a 70-foot transmission pole near the Cloverdale intersection and restored power at 12:30 p.m.," said Alan Guggenheim, member services director of CEC.

"Our goal was to restore power to Sisters by 1 p.m. We're really happy to have restored power as quickly as we did, what with the freezing temperatures and snowy conditions," said Guggenheim. "We were able to make the repairs and replace that pole so quickly because of our line crews' training and experience. We had tremendous cooperation from the sheriff's department and the Oregon Department of Transportation, which blocked both lanes of traffic on U.S. Hwy. 126, enabling us to work more safely and efficiently."

Guggenheim also noted that CEC's current project to upgrade power transmission, including a new substation at Tollgate, would have made the incident much less severe and of shorter duration.

"If we had been able to complete the Jordan Road-Black Butte Ranch transmission line and convert it from 69 kilovolts to 115 kilovolts, at the same time we did the Highway 126 transmission line to Sisters Substation last fall, we could have shortened today's outage by almost five hours," he said. "We would have had the 3,000 Sisters customers back on with power by 7 a.m., same time we had the 1,400 customers in Eagle Ridge subdivision back on. Hopefully we can complete Tollgate Substation this fall and convert that Jordan Road-Black Butte Ranch transmission line to 115 kilovolts before the end of 2011."