By VERNON ROBISON
Moapa Valley Progress
Homes in a large section of Logandale lost electrical power service on Thursday, Jan. 4 when a truck travelling along Moapa Valley Blvd. veered off the road and hit a power pole near Wells Ave.
The accident occurred at about 8:43 am. The truck, which was apparently travelling north on the state highway, left the road just before the Wells Ave. intersection and plowed into the power pole on the east side of the highway. That pole holds the powerline which crosses the highway and continues along the south side of Wells Ave.
No other vehicles were involved in the crash and no one was injured.
But the bottom third of the wooden pole was completely shredded by the impact. The top of the pole fell over the back of the truck and the live power lines came to rest across the entire width of Moapa Valley Blvd. This stopped all traffic from flowing in either direction for a short period of time.
Traffic was soon rerouted over to Mills Street on the west of the highway by way of Wells Ave to the north and Waite Ave to the south.
Traffic was heavy for a time along the tiny Mills St. which is a narrow dirt road winding through a residential and agricultural neighborhood. The small dusty road was required to take all of the highway traffic for a couple of hours.
The accident caused a power outage which affected a total of 367 Overton Power District customers, mainly located in the neighborhoods on the west side of Moapa Valley Blvd.
OPD crews responded to the scene almost immediately and had help in securing the area by a Metro police unit who also responded quickly to the scene.
“The first priority was to secure the area and make sure no one was exposed to the downed power line,” said OPD Public Affairs Specialist Keith Buchhalter. “Then we started to assess the damage and figuring out what was needed to repair it.”
According to Buchhalter, the crew on-site coordinated carefully with the OPD Substation crew to reroute power to as many customers as possible while repairs were being made. By 9:55 am, power was restored to 167 of the affected customers. An additional 94 customers were restored by 10:45 am. By 11:47 all customers were back on line.
“It was an impressive job that our crew and the Substation team did,” Buchhalter said. “It started out with that pole being completely destroyed. With something like that, getting the power restored within three hours time is pretty impressive.”
