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comment by WanderingEng
WanderingEng  ·  1366 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: February 17, 2021

I work for a utility, and they probably have a record that it's down. Maybe not, but losing track of a line outage would be unheard of.

My personal anecdote is we had some intense wind rip through our footprint back a couple years ago. Some big lines were down which also blacked out at least one substation. It took hours to even get crews to answer the phone because they were so busy with other restorations. Once they got the big lines fixed and restored that substation, the load on it was zero because every little line coming out of it was also down. It's a rural area so it got little attention in news, but the area just got smashed.

From what I see in Oregon, you have much the same thing but in higher population areas and over a bigger geographic area.