The Haxtun-Fleming Herald - What can we reason but from what we know? -Alexander Pope

Haxtun residents spent the day and most of the night without power Monday. Shortly after eight in the morning on Dec. 6 all Haxtun residents lost total power. According to Town Superintendent Ron Carpenter failure in a fuse caused the situation.

Carpenter said a fuse failed on Western Area Power Administration’s side of things at a substation south of Haxtun. That failure disabled the Town’s transformer, which supplies Haxtun residents with power.

WAPA is one of four power marketing administrations within the United States Department of Energy whose role is to market and transmit wholesale electricity. WAPA sells power to preference customers such as Federal and state agencies, cities and towns, rural electric cooperatives, public utility districts, irrigation districts and Native American tribes, including the Town of Haxtun.

Crews from WAPA and the Town of Haxtun spent all day Monday, through the night and into Tuesday morning working to restore power for residents. That success came at about 4 a.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 7.

After nearly 12 hours without power and no immediate end in sight Monday evening around 8 p.m. a reverse 911 went out to all residents notifying them of the situation. At that time, an emergency shelter was established at the Paoli Community Center.

“WAPA is not sure why the fuse failed,” Carpenter said Tuesday morning. “The solution was to replace it with a new one and some new hardware. The reason it took as long as it did to restore power is because WAPA had to conduct extensive testing on our transformer to determine if it was the cause of the fuse failure. Our transformer passed testing so it is unknown what caused the failure at this time.”