Wind, not rolling blackout, causes brief power outage

Thursday, July 12, 2001 | 11:13 a.m.

About 10,000 Nevada Power customers lost electricity Wednesday afternoon but it was not a repeat of last week's rolling blackout, company officials said.

The outage -- this time caused by wind -- affected a wide area over the Las Vegas Valley's west side, from Spring Mountain Road to Charleston Boulevard and from Jones Boulevard to Interstate 15, the company said.

Most customers lost power for a little more than one hour beginning at 2 p.m., but several hundred customers near the site of the wind incident at Sahara Avenue and Valley View Boulevard didn't get power back for about two hours.

The cause of the outage was a service-station sign panel blown into the air by a dust devil, hitting and grounding a major power transmission line, said Sonya Headen, Nevada Power spokeswoman.

"This was not a rolling blackout," Headen said. "This is something that happened with the weather. We received a lot of phone calls from people accusing us of having rolling blackouts and not notifying the public, and we want to assure people that was not the case."

A one-hour blackout July 2 affected about the same number of Nevada Power customers. The earlier incident was caused by record heat sweeping the entire West and long-standing power shortages over at least 10 states, company officials said.

One Clark County official said Wednesday's cause might have been much different, but one problem remained: haphazard notification of public safety agencies.

Bob Andrews, Clark County emergency management official, said he found out about the power outage from a commercial radio station.

"We should have had notification from Nevada Power," he said. "We shouldn't be getting this in the County Government Center over the radio. ... The recurring concern is public anxiety."

Headen, however, said occasional power outages due to mechanical problems, weather-related events and accidents are "very routine." What makes government officials and customers sensitive are the blackouts due to power shortages, which have also occurred in California.

"People are just a little bit on edge right now."

She said parts of the valley around Henderson had outages related to mechanical problems with a transformer twice last week.

If Nevada Power had to alert emergency management every time the power went off in a neighborhood, "We would be calling Mr. Andrews quite a bit," Headen said.

If Nevada Power's policy needs to be changed, the company will review it, she added.

One of the principal concerns of public safety agencies during power losses is control of traffic signals at intersections. Andrews said Metro Police reported no accidents because of the loss of power.

Police ask drivers to be careful at such uncontrolled intersections and treat them as four-way stops.