Accident causes power outage in Sisters

A single-vehicle crash early on Saturday morning led to a blackout to about 3,000 Central Electric Cooperative customers in the city of Sisters and to the east and south of town.

CEC spokesman Jeff Beaman told The Nugget that a pickup driven by a young male driver crashed into a power transmission pole on Highway 126 near Geo. Cyrus Road at about 2:15â¯a.m.

"It was sheared off at the base and moved about 10 feet by the impact," Beaman said.

Power was not knocked out at that time. However, at about 6:15 a.m., CEC crews removed the power transmission line, which took down power.

"It's a major construction effort to replace a pole like that," Beaman explained.

The pole is 70-feet tall and is buried about eight feet into the ground.

The Sisters Fresh Hop Festival and the Sisters Mountain Bike Festival went forward as planned. Some business activity was disrupted, but power was restored to Sisters before noon and to customers in the immediate area of the accident about an hour later.

Beaman noted that there will be a planned outage on October 10-11 in the final phase of an upgrade that will create redundancy that would prevent an incident such as this one from leaving Sisters without power.

"This is exactly why we're doing the improvements we are," Beaman said. "You'd probably have a much shorter outage because we could switch around and supply from another direction."