Douglas PUD Battles Outages Amidst Snowy Weather Last Few Days

Douglas PUD crews could not catch a break this week after they contended with multiple outages near the Bridgeport area.

On Sunday at 10:20 a.m., over 850 customers lost power around Bridgeport, with crews finding trees and branches impacting power lines.

Around 5:30 p.m., crews thought they had everything repaired, however when they tried to re-energize, the line tripped out again. 

Power was fully restored around 9 p.m.

Then on Monday around 10 a.m., there were large outages in the north part of Douglas County, with the snowy weather breaking tree branches and impacting more power lines.

Nearly 900 residents were out of power and at this point, Douglas PUD crews had already worked nearly 24 hours straight.

Power was nearly restored everywhere by 1 p.m. However, crews kept working until 5 p.m.

Then early on Tuesday morning, power went out for 700 Bridgeport residents.

Power was restored at 2:30 a.m., but 350 residents lost power nearly an hour later.

Finally at 8:30 a.m., power was restored to all customers.

Douglas PUD Public Information Officer Meghan Vibbert said there may be more outages in the future due to the weather.

“It's a terrible storm up in Bridgeport right now,” Vibbert said. “We've got between six inches to 15 inches of snow blowing. It's really wet, that in combination with the trees with the leaves on them still which break easily that way, there's really high winds, and so those factors are abusive to our electric system.”