Most Vera Customers Avoid Sustained Outage

While 30,000 homes throughout the Spokane area remained dark and cold Thursday night, two small Valley electric companies had restored warmth and light to all but a few hundred of their customers.

Only about 1,800 of Vera Water and Power’s 7,500 electric customers lost power during Tuesday’s ice storm. By Thursday, general manager Kevin Wells said, Vera crews had restored power to all but about 500 of those customers.

Modern Electric Water Company’s customers were hit harder. About 8,000 of the 9,000 homes served by Modern lost power because of the storm. As of Thursday, Modern general manager Mike Baker said, linemen had restored power to all but 750 customers.

Between them, the two utilities serve less than half of the homes in the Valley. Washington Water Power serves the majority of residents. Inland Power and Light also serves 1,500 Valley homes.

Homes served by Vera and Modern that are still without electricity could stay that way for at least a few more days, Wells and Baker said.

The 750 Modern customers still without power will prove to be the toughest to service, Baker said.

Those repairs involve reconnecting each home’s line to the main feeder lines, he said. Some of the downed lines are in customers’ yards and must be completed one by one. That’s more time-consuming than fixing a feeder line which services dozens or hundreds of homes.

“It’s pretty fast until you sit there with nothing,” said Baker, whose own home is also without power. “That was the absolute worst for us.”

Scattered throughout Vera’s service areas are homes and streets were the entire electrical system - transformers, poles, wires - were completely destroyed.

“They (the houses) will be the last ones,” said Wells. “We can’t just put it back together. We have to start from scratch.”

Vera hired extra linemen from an Oregon utility to help with the rest of the work.

Wells said one thing that helped the Vera avoid more widespread problems was the underground lines the utility uses to service about half its customers.

“All those people (served by underground lines) have power,” he said, adding that they never lost it through the whole storm. The transformers for the underground lines sit on the ground inside steel boxes. “You can pretty much drop a tree on those things and they don’t flinch,” he said.

Vera services areas between Interstate 90 and 50th Avenue and McDonald and Flora roads. Modern services an area north of 32nd Avenue between McDonald to Argonne roads.

Both Baker and Wells said that the linemen have been pushing themselves to work around the clock. “We send them home to get sleep,” Wells said. “I don’t know how long we can go at this pace. But they don’t want to stop until power is restored to everyone.”

, DataTimes