Three power outages strike Lovell area

A trio of power outages that struck the Lovell area Monday and Tuesday are at least partially the result of new safety protocols now in place in Wyoming, according to a Rocky Mountain Power spokesman.

Two outages took place Monday and a third Tuesday. The first was from 11:40 a.m. to 1:20 p.m. Monday, then a second from 2:07 to 2:24 p.m. Monday. A third outage was in effect from 10:43 to 11:32 a.m. Tuesday. Each of the outages affected 1,060 Rocky Mountain Power customers in the Lovell and Garland areas.

According to RMP spokesman Jona Whitesides, 2025 is the first year many circuits and customers in Wyoming have been included in a program of enhanced safety settings. In the past, he said, the power system would cycle through three times to try to clear a fault, but under enhanced safety settings, the system automatically deenergizes if debris, wind or an animal causes a fault on the system during fire season, and the company sends a crew out to see where the fault occurred so that, when the power is restored, the cause of the fault won’t spark a wildfire.

The enhanced settings are only in effect during summer, Whitesides said.

He said there is “definitely some trial and error” in calibrating the sensitivity of the safety settings, but that process has now been completed with the response to the outages, so there “shouldn’t be any issues going forward.”

Whitesides said RMP has been operating for five years or more in some parts of the utility’s service territory, and after an assessment two years ago, RMP extended the operational practice to most of Wyoming this year and has been working to find a balance between reliability and safety.

During the summer, when conditions are dry, the system operates on a more sensitive setting, not set to cycle three times, which resulted in the outages Monday. When essentially the same outage occurred Tuesday, a crew was able to recalibrate the system, “and it should be fine now,” Whitesides said.

Engineers worked to recalibrate the system and sectionalize the area without compromising safety, the spokesman said, and when the system was re-energized, it held.