Cable Fault Cause Of Power Outage

Moapa Valley residents living in the sand hills on the east bench of the valley experienced a power outage late on Friday night. The outage occurred at about 11:30 p.m. and power was not restored until around 2:00 a.m. Approximately 250 households were affected by the outage which ranged from the Whipple substation, south to the Perkins Field Airport.

Overton Power District officials said that the outage was caused by a high voltage cable that faulted in a line feeding the Crafty Featherworks factory near the airport in Overton.

“All the cable in that area is underground,” said Richard Jones of OPD. “There are three cables in one conduit and when one of them faulted it burned through the other two causing the outage.”

Jones explained that cable faults of this kind are usually caused by the cable reaching the end of its life-span of 20-25 years. “That’s about the timeframe of that particular cable,” he said. “We routinely change out those cables, but in this case it was serving just the one customer at the end of the line, so it got pushed back on the schedule.”

A crew of six OPD men worked late into the night to restore power. They returned the next morning to make more permanent changes to fully restore the system, Jones said.