Moapa Valley Progress
Residents of northeastern Clark County suffered a major power outage on Monday, January 21. The outage, which began at about 8:00 am and stretched late into the afternoon, affected all customers of the Overton Power District (OPD) in both Moapa Valley and Virgin Valley.
The outage was caused by an electrical fire that started at the top of a wooden power pole near the Reid Gardner substation in Moapa. The cause of the fire was still under investigation but it was suspected that the stormy weather that morning may have been a factor, according to an OPD statement.
The power line affected by the fire was a high voltage 230 KV transmission line that feeds power from the regional grid directly into the Tortoise Substation in Moapa, the main hub of OPD. The fire knocked out power to the entire OPD system including all 15,934 customers in both valleys. It also affected customers of the Lincoln County Power District which also receives its power through Tortoise Substation.
OPD officials were notified by NV Energy at around 7:30 am that a pole on the transmission line had caught fire. By 7:55, district employees were notified that the transmission line needed to be de-energized in order to replace the damaged equipment.
Unsure of where the fire was, OPD crews were dispatched immediately to locate the problem. Beginning at Tortoise substation, they systematically inspected the line back to its connection at Reid Gardner. It wasn’t until they reach the plant that they found that the fire had occurred on a pole just inside of the NV Energy fence line. With the issue being on NV Energy property, all that was left for OPD crews to do was await the arrival of NV Energy crews to fix the problem.
NV Energy manpower and equipment had to be dispatched from the Las Vegas valley to address the issue. Crews arrived at around noon and immediately began to work on the repairs. By 2:00 pm, OPD had received confirmation from the NV Energy crews that power would be restored in approximately two hours.
In the meantime, OPD crews went to work in trying to restore power to critical areas in the communities. Utilizing a small transmission line out of St. George, Utah, they were able to energize certain circuits in Mesquite that would keep the Mesa View Hospital, Mesquite Police Department and Mesquite Fire Department #3 in power. In addition, the district responded to a request to energize the Eagle’s Landing Travel Center at I-15 exit 118 to allow Interstate travellers a place to purchase fuel as they passed through the area.
NV Energy crews had repairs completed by 4:15 pm and power began to be restored to the system in stages. All OPD customers had power by about 5:30 pm.
“NV Energy has been great to work with,” said OPD General Manager Mendis Cooper. “They assembled a good-sized crew on a holiday to come out here and solve this problem. They did a great job and we appreciate their efforts!”
NV Energy officials were not available for comment by the time this edition went to press.
Power is delivered to the OPD system from the Mead substation near Boulder City. From there it is transmitted along NV Energy power lines to a large substation at the Reid Gardner location. It is then delivered via an OPD transmission line to the Tortoise Substation in Moapa. That final stretch of line is the only one with enough capacity to energize the entire OPD system. No second line for redundancy has yet been built, though plans have been made to do so.
A similar system-wide outage occurred in March of 2016 when lightning struck an OPD pole carrying the line as it connected to Tortoise Substation. At that time, the entire OPD system was down for more than 16 hours.
