Tooele County Jail dealing with recent surge of power outages, presenting potential risk

TOOELE — Tooele County sheriff’s officials said a recent spike in power outages at the jail coincides with an effort by the power company to reduce the risk of wildfires by de-energizing lines.

According to Lt. Darin Durfey, jail commander at the Tooele County Detention Center, the facility has experienced six outages within the past month, with one lasting as long as six hours, prompting concerns about a potential security risk.

“You may have a door that’s open,” Durfey said. “You may have some bump where it actually opens doors—we’ve had that happen.”

Durfey said that whenever an outage occurs, guards must account for every inmate and secure areas while the power is restored. He said it also results in greater time spent moving through the jail with manual locks and a lack of temperature control.

“It’s problematic getting places, making sure that we ensure the safety and security of the inmates,” Durfey said.

He said Tooele County Sheriff’s officials had reached out to Rocky Mountain Power about the problem.

“They have indicated that there are times where they may end up de-energizing lines, and that may be, in the case of a wildfire, high winds,” Durfey said.

Jona Whitesides, a spokesman for RMP, said the company was aware of the six outages at the jail and that “enhanced safety settings” were in place in Tooele County, which could lead to unexpected outages for residents and businesses.

Whitesides said residents were notified about the settings in late May, as the company hoped to reduce the risk that one of its lines might start a wildfire.

“We recognize that we’ve been impacting people’s daily lives, even businesses,” he said. “We just don’t want to start a large wildfire and compromise the grid structure and put it in danger.”

Whitesides also noted that a recloser, which he likened to a surge protector, was malfunctioning in the area recently and could have meant the line was tripping more frequently and possibly causing outages.

With that issue fixed, he said the jail specifically should see less of an impact.

“We have looked at the function of our generator, what it’s capable of doing and we know that there are some deficiencies there,” Durfey said.

Durfey continued that it’s possible the sheriff’s office could eventually seek to bolster its backup generator capacity, but that comes with a cost.

“When we’re talking about needs to meet the constitutional requirements that we have, if we’re responsible to then power some of those basic needs, we may have an ask that we need a larger generator, or we need some sort of source to power HVAC units or other things if it’s going to be an extended power outage,” he said.