What Causes PUD Power Outages?

Prepare for outages | Outage rates for the last 15 years

Klickitat PUD's Operations Department recently released the compiled outage statistics for the past 15 years, showing that 2005 was a very low year for power outages for KPUD customers, with only 176 outages overall, which includes planned outages.

"When you look at the numbers over a period of years, you see that it's mostly due to weather," said Ron Ihrig, operations manager. "There will be several good years in a row, and then several rough years."

Ron explained that their goal is to improve the system, so that outages won't affect as many people. The number of outages may increase, but they will affect less people for a shorter amount of time.

Trees falling on lines caused a large number of the outages, with animal problems running a close second, but the hours of outage caused by trees and animals were drastically reduced, but problems caused by storm conditions, including ice, snow, wind and lightening were down.

In 2004, there were a total of 16,754 customer hours of outages, which averages to a little more than 1.75 hours of outage per customer. This was a reduction of almost 1 hour from the 2003 number of outage hours.

"We kept the lights on 99.825 percent of the time last year," said Ron.

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Last updated: 12/2009
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