Central Electric Cooperative is offering a reward up to $2,500 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or people responsible for yesterday afternoon’s firearm vandalism to the cooperative’s transmission line serving the Madras area.
The resulting outage began at about 2:40pm Sunday when one of the transmission lines feeding into the Madras and Gateway substations lost power, causing a voltage imbalance on other transmission lines connected to the substation. This caused a complete loss of power to about 1,200 member accounts and a brownout effect to other accounts. The substations were de-energized until the cause of the power outage was determined and repaired. Final restoration was achieved at approximately 1:30 a.m. today.
During their patrol of the affected 69,000-volt line to locate the problem, crews discovered a 400-foot span of overhead wire severed by a gunshot. The fault location was west of Highway 26 and north of Holly Lane in desert land southeast of Madras and northeast of Terrebonne. The amount of crew time, equipment use and materials required to repair the span will add up to several thousand dollars. Those costs are in addition to the amount of time affected CEC members were without power and its impact on their activities and operations.
Anyone with information about suspicious activity in the area is asked to call the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department’s non-emergency number, 541-475-6520.
