Power outage in Mt. Crested Butte impacts long weekend

Switch malfunction increased size of outage

A power outage just before sunset on Sunday night left Mt. Crested Butte businesses, homes, and hotels without power at the height of the Presidents’ Day weekend. Outages ranged from an hour or less to more than seven hours, and forced business owners to adjust their expectations for holiday revenues.

According to Roger Grogg, chief operations officer for Gunnison County Electric Association (GCEA), a couple of problems occurred around 5:30 p.m. on Sunday. “We had an underground fault off of Anthracite Road and a switch coordination problem that caused a longer outage,” Grogg said.
Had the switch been working properly, the outage wouldn’t have been as widespread and the problem would have been easier to isolate. As it was, crews had to go from transformer to transformer in order to find the issues.
Grogg said the first area affected was Sunlight Ridge and included the cell towers, communication towers for local first responders, and 65 GCEA members. “We restored service to all but four members and then went to the outage on Anthracite, which affected 85 members on Gothic Road, Ruby Drive and Aspen Lane. After restoring power to these members we returned to the last four members on the first outage at shortly after 2 a.m.,” Grogg said.
He also said the base area from Elevation Hotel on was on and off due to a breaker malfunctioning—and the switch problem made solving these outages more time-consuming. “We could not use the switch without dropping large portions of the mountain, so this made it a long process, going one section of cable at a time,” Grogg said.
According to Todd Barnes, owner of the Avalanche Bar and Grill, the Avy lost power twice: for about an hour starting at 5:30 p.m. and later for another 15 or 20 minutes.
“It was dusk for sure,” Barnes said, “so for a few moments the ambience was pretty cool but then we realized it was going to be real dark in the restaurant and people started to get up and leave.”
Barnes does keep a generator on site—summer lightning strikes in Meridian Lake caused a few different outages one summer and he wanted to be prepared. So on Sunday night, he was still able to process credit cards for customers and the outages didn’t last long enough to affect the cooler or food storage. But Barnes estimates the loss of power cost him between $1,500 and $2,000 in sales.
“We went from expecting to be busy all night long to garnering half of what we’d expected,” Barnes said.
Crested Butte Mountain Resort experienced a similar pattern. According to director of innovations and relations Erica Mueller, the resort lost power for about an hour in the Lodge at Mountaineer Square, the Grand Lodge, the Emmons Building and Treasury. Power was initially restored at 6:10 p.m. and there was a second short outage later in the evening.
“The second blip caught us off guard,” Mueller said, but indicated that all systems came back on properly.
Town manager Joe Fitzpatrick said the outages also affected pick-up and drop-off for the town shuttle. The gates into Mountaineer Square malfunctioned, getting stuck in a closed position. “We ended up having to take them apart, which is not too hard a thing to do, but we had to drop people off on the street for a while,” Fitzpatrick said.
Overall, people remained optimistic during the outages. Barnes said none of the Avy’s customers were really upset—just uncomfortable being in a dark, candlelit restaurant that they didn’t know that well—and it was the timing of the holiday weekend that was most unfortunate. “Overall it’s a small hiccup,” he said.
GCEA crews were headed to Mt. Crested Butte the following week to take a closer look at the switch problem. According to Grogg, “We’ll have engineers there to make sure what should have been a small problem doesn’t turn into a big problem like it did over the weekend.”