The Christmas Eve blackout left residents and visitors in the Sun Valley area in the dark—in more ways than one.
Around 10 p.m. on Dec. 24, the lights went out on nearly 20,000 Idaho Power customers in this area. Callers to Idaho Power's emergencies and outages line heard all night that workers were looking for the problem, but hadn't found it.
The next morning, crews had been dispatched to a downed line. The message didn't say when power might be restored.
For years, Idaho Power has told anyone who would listen that a catastrophic failure in a critical substation could leave the area without power for up to two weeks. The company has been working to get approval for a secondary system to avoid that happening.
That message was on the minds of everyone who's been paying attention.
In a power outage, Idaho Power's responsibility is to get the power back on. However, the responsibility to care for the general public falls on officials in counties and cities.
Despite the fact that an area full of holiday visitors sustained a dark, cold night and awoke to colder rooms and houses the next morning, information on what to do as the outage continued was hard to find.
Citizens needed to know where they could get warm if temperatures in homes and lodges continued to drop, where to get gasoline if they needed to leave and where to get water—or food—if needed.
The county has no trigger point for widespread communication of options for the public—after so many hours without power, for example.
Some citizens called 911—overwhelming the system, according to one county official. The Blaine County Sheriff's Office fielded non-emergency phone calls.
However, many people couldn't call because cell or landline phones were out in some places. A scan through car radio frequencies yielded nothing.
The only information broadcast was in a reverse-911 recorded telephone message when the power was about to come back on. It advised that non-essential electronics be shut off to reduce power loads. People without phone service never got it.
Much more information should have been available much earlier through every available channel—including the Internet. The Web was accessible with smartphones, which are everywhere these days, but it wasn't utilized.
People in charge of local emergency services came up short on communicating with the public during the Castle Rock Fire in 2007. Elected officials vowed to fix the problem. They obviously didn't.
They left the public in the dark—some for 18 hours or more—again.
It's a good thing mountain people are resourceful because outside the county's cozy new public safety facility in Hailey, it looked like every family was on its own.
