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Loading...Wet, windy and icy weather conditions meant lights out for more than 1,200 people in four separate power outages in Tooele County Monday night.
At 5:49 p.m., 627 customers in Rush Valley were left in the dark, and a minute later, 111 customers in Skull Valley found themselves in the same predicament, said Jeff Hymas, spokesman for Rocky Mountain Power.
At 9:26 p.m., 74 customers in Stockton experienced a loss of power, he added, and at 1:06 a.m. today, 443 customers were also blacked out.
Hymas said all four of the outages were caused by weather conditions, which included powerful gusts of wind and heavy rainfall that turned to ice and snow overnight. The winds alone accounted for the outages in Lake Point and Stockton, while the loss of a transmission line plagued both Skull Valley and Rush Valley. Those same weather conditions made the outages more challenging to diagnose and fix, he said.
“Due to the rain and snow in the area, we had to bring in special equipment in order to patrol the transmission lines between Rush Valley and Dugway,” he said. “The weather conditions made it even more difficult to patrol lines and find the problems.”
Power was restored to Rush Valley at 8:21 p.m., and to Stockton shortly after midnight. Lake Point’s power was back on by 5:50 a.m. today, and Skull Valley’s was fixed at 8:21 a.m. today.
Hymas said the wild weather accounted for several blackouts across the state, but were concentrated along the Wasatch Front and Tooele County because of the storm’s path.
Sgt. Bob Gutierrez of the Utah Highway Patrol said despite the bad weather, troopers in Tooele County responded to no weather-related crashes through the night.
“We didn’t have anything that was weather-related, so we were pretty lucky,” Gutierrez said. “As far as the Tooele area, we were pretty fortunate. We didn’t have much.”
In Tooele City, though, snow and ice-covered traffic signals caused some confusion over right-of-way, said Lt. Adrian Day. Two multi-car accidents, involving seven vehicles total, occurred this morning at the intersection of Main Street and Utah Avenue, and another multi-car crash happened at the Main Street and 400 North intersection.
Day said of those accidents, only one person, a 22-year-old man who suffered head injuries at the crash on the 400 North intersection, was injured severely enough to require hospital care. He was taken to Mountain West Medical Center by ambulance, Day said.
