EDITORIAL: A Perfect Storm Of Unfortunate Events

The last time the Overton Power District suffered a system-wide outage, before last week, was in March of 2016. At that time, OPD General Manager Mendis Cooper commented on the rather tough luck that a lightning bolt should strike the last power pole, just before the transmission line connected in to the district’s Moapa Tortoise substation, its main hub for power delivery and distribution.

“It was just about the worst place that we could get hit!” Cooper said at that time.
Well, take out those two little qualifying words “just about” and the rest of that statement might perfectly describe what happened last week in the system-wide OPD power outage. It was a remarkable perfect storm of unfortunate events.

The first misfortune was in where the problem occurred. It was on that same vital transmission line, the only one with adequate capacity to feed all of OPD customers. But this time it was at the opposite end of the line. An electrical fire ignited at the top of the last pole before connecting to the Reid Gardner substation where all OPD power is delivered. That pole happened to be just inside the fenceline of the NV Energy property at Reid Gardner.

NV Energy employees identified the problem almost immediately, but they didn’t have the manpower or equipment on the nearly demolished plant site to fix it. OPD crews were on scene within just a few minutes. But though the local crews were fully equipped to go to work, they didn’t have legal authorization to access NV Energy property and fix the problem. All they could do was stand just outside the gate and watch the top of that pole smoulder.

The other major misfortune last week was in when the outage occurred. It was early in the morning of Martin Luther King Day, a national holiday. NV Energy crews had to be called off their vacation day back to work in order to bring equipment from Las Vegas and fix the problem. That took quite awhile. Instead of repairs being started immediately at 8:00 am, when OPD had arrived, NV Energy wasn’t able to muster a crew to the location until well after noon. Meanwhile 15,000 customers in Moapa Valley and Virgin Valleys passed the day without power.

When the NV Energy crews finally did arrive they went to work quickly and efficiently. They eventually solved the problem and all was well again. These employees should be credited for their good work.

But they were understandably a bit grumpy when they arrived. This was manifest almost immediately with a rather brusque ejection of all members of the local media from the premises. Now, we can give them a partial pass on this. After all, the job of the work crews is to fix the line, not to deal with the press; even though the media representatives in attendance were neither bothering them with questions nor getting in the way of their work.

More difficult to excuse, though, was the fact that there was no getting in touch with those at NV Energy who WERE in charge of dealing with the media. Time was short, press deadlines were looming, the power was out; yet no timely response came to repeated requests for information. Yes, it was a holiday. But when an equipment failure on their end causes an outage to 15,000 customers, one might expect at least a brief press release to be issued on the matter from a company as large as NV Energy. Nothing came.

In this, the big regional utility might have taken a lesson from our little local OPD. The way that district staff handled the task of informing the public throughout this outage was absolutely top-notch! The district lit up social media, email and text messaging in getting information to its customers. It would have been tough to find anyone in town who did not know what was going on. And the district kept the community informed of progress throughout the day. It was excellent work!

In the end, there is not much anyone could have done about the unfortunate ‘where’ and ‘when’ in this situation. But it is clear, now more than ever, just how much a second transmission line into the OPD system is needed. In the past three years we have experienced two statistically unlikely system-wide power outages related to problems on that one line. Perhaps it is not as statistically unlikely as it seems. Each such outage has come at an untold cost to local businesses and individuals.

To be fair to OPD, a second transmission line project has loomed large on the district’s capital improvement wish list for a long time. Unfortunately, the line is millions of dollars, hundreds of decisions and many years away from being complete. Even so, it would be well for the OPD Board and staff to set this as a high priority item, and address it with a single-minded focus.

For last week’s outage, though a much simpler and obvious solution is evident. More than four hours might have been shaved off of the outage if only the most readily available work crew had been allowed to go to work on the problem immediately.
OPD crews were on scene. They had the manpower, they had the tools and they had the talent. They were eager to get it fixed. All they needed was a ‘go-ahead’ to enter the gate and fix the line. If the fire had occurred on the very next pole just outside the fenceline, it is likely we all would have been back in power before lunchtime.

In this mad world where fears over legal liability seem to govern everything, the solution we would propose might be way too simplistic. But wouldn’t it be wise for a cooperative agreement to be negotiated between OPD and NV Energy just in case of unfortunate incidents like occurred last week?

With Reid Gardner plant soon disappearing utterly from the landscape; and with it a regular NV Energy presence in the vicinity; it seems like it might be a good idea to make advance provisions whereby OPD crews might be allowed to walk on and take care of problems like this immediately and without delay.

No doubt the attorneys on both sides are already feeling faint at the very idea of such a bold and sensible suggestion. But given the realities on the ground, and given what is at stake for our communities, would a cooperative maintenance agreement between NV Energy and OPD at this crucial location really be such an impossible idea? Just a thought.