Crews Working To Restore Power After Winter Storm Hits Wasatch Front

Rocky Mountain power crews say they are working as fast as they can to restore the power to thousands of people left in the dark after the winter storm swept through the Wasatch Front.

 

At the time of this article, there were still about 13,000 people without power, and affected customers should be prepared to be without power overnight.

 

“We are asking customers to be prepared,” said Tiffany Erickson, a spokesperson for Rocky Mountain Power. “Preparation would be: stay warm, blankets, water, make sure you have everything that you need should you not be able to have your power stored overnight. It’s a tough outage this one.”

 

Erickson says the challenge is that they are dealing with more than 900 individual outages, rather than just a handful of them.

 

“We are not just dealing with one outage that affects a lot of customers we are dealing with multiple outages. The challenge is getting enough people out [in the field]. Right now have over 100 people in the field,” said Erickson.

 

Erickson says additional crews have come in from American Fork, Layton, Ogden and even from out of state to help out.

The city of Salt Lake says this is a storm that could be felt for a very long time.

 

“Storm events like this we will feel the effects for months, if not years, because there is damage that has occurred that people don’t know about,” said Tony Gliot, Salt Lake City’s director of Urban Forestry. “It is city-wide it is not one neighborhood or a couple of neighborhoods it’s every neighborhood.”

 

That’s why he says it may take a while for crews to clean up everything.

 

“We can only get to so many at a time. Many of the most severe incidents take all day for one crew to address. It doesn’t take long before they add up and you are looking at a back log for days,” said Gliot.