Many City of Valentine customers were without power for about an hour beginning at about 8am on Sunday morning.
The culprit was apparently a 34 thousand volt lightning arrestor which protects transformers at the Government Street substation. The reason for the failure is unknown at this time.
City officials were able to temporarily redirect the load to the S. Lodi substation after about an hour.
After power was restored to City of Valentine customers affected by the outage, crews worked for nearly 7 hours repairing and replacing equipment.
The city was fortunate to have the equipment needed to repair the substation in such a timely manner.
According to Justin Holmes with the city electric department, there is about an “18 month back order on these arrestors… it’s actually worse than buying new transformers”. Were the parts not on hand, the city would have needed to bring in a mobile unit to fill in for the damaged substation.
On a related note, several KBR Rural Public Power customers west of Valentine were without electricity for a short time on Saturday afternoon. KBR linemen found a breaker tripped, but it was unknown the cause.