As I write this (on Dec. 25, at 7:59 p.m.), parts of West Ketchum and elsewhere—including Edelweiss Avenue, where I just came from, after turning on the water in the house for a friend of mine who's currently in San Diego increasingly worried his pipes would freeze if I didn't—are still without power. But thankfully, most area residents are back online—and not being forced to eat their Christmas dinner with the aid of a flashlight.
In 16 years here, this is easily the longest-lasting (and most far-reaching) power outage I've ever experienced, affecting some 15,000 or more Idaho Power customers—pretty much everyone from Galena Lodge south almost to Twin Falls at one stage of it or another. Thankfully, too, it apparently wasn't marred by any sort of criminal activity and, instead—much like 2007's Castle Rock Fire—seemed to bring out the very best in people here and otherwise vividly illustrated yet again why this is such an amazing community to live in and interact with.
Ironically, just yesterday I read in the Idaho Mountain Express Trevon Milliard's Dec. 23 article "Power customers break record twice," which said in part that Blaine County's 16,723 customers had contributed to breaking records for power use twice already this winter due, in part, to the sustained below-zero temps we've had to endure repeatedly this winter—though the "winter record peak of 2,527 megawatts [set on Dec. 10, 2009] isn't even close to the summer peak of 3,214 megawatts set on June 30, 2008." Very encouraging to read, also, in that article that despite frequent rumors to the contrary, our county is using its "proportionate share" of electricity (but no more), and that we've "really stepped up in energy-efficiency measures."
Since we're probably at least a couple years away from Idaho Power's building another series of transmission lines that'll alleviate some of the stress the current ones are having to deal with, I sincerely hope that very encouraging trend continues.
John Pluntze
Ketchum
