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Rocky Mountain Power explains intermittent outages in Ogden, cites wildfire‑safety settings
Summary
Rocky Mountain Power told the Ogden City Council it has applied enhanced safety settings on circuits near the mountains to reduce wildfire risk; company representatives said those settings can lengthen outages in affected areas while vegetation work and reclosers reduce the impacted customer base.
Rocky Mountain Power representatives told the Ogden City Council on Tuesday that recent intermittent power outages in parts of Ogden reflect intentionally heightened safety settings on circuits the company has identified as at elevated wildfire risk.
Kirk Nigro, regional business manager for Rocky Mountain Power, said the company has implemented “enhanced safety settings” on lines serving areas near the mountains. He said the settings are more sensitive to faults so that equipment will not reclose automatically when a fault could indicate a risk of ignition. “We are putting safety of the communities and their customers first over reliability,” Nigro said. The company added a recloser on the McKay 13 circuit to reduce the number of affected customers from about 2,000 to roughly 200 in the elevated‑risk stretch.
Nigro told council members the utility will perform vegetation‑management work along affected circuits in the next two to three months and dispatch troubleshooters to address immediate hotspots. He said the company uses historical data, weather forecasting and simulations to identify circuits for the enhanced settings and that the measures respond to dry conditions and increased wildfire risk.
Council members and the mayor acknowledged the safety rationale but pressed for clearer customer communications. Council Member Graff said residents reported difficulty getting direct answers from the utility and suggested improved notification to customers on impacted circuits. Nigro said Rocky Mountain Power sends outage notices based on customer contact information the company has on file and encouraged customers to keep contact details current; he also pointed to incentives for battery backups and other resiliency options available through the utility website.
Mayor Benjamin K. Nadalski and other council members thanked Nigro for the company’s engagement and for providing a local point of contact; they also urged continued coordination with city public‑safety and public‑works staff during the season. Council members asked the utility to consider town‑hall style outreach to help residents understand the tradeoffs between momentary reliability and wildfire risk reduction.
Residents at the meeting described multiple local outages this summer; some said outages lasted several hours and affected remote workers and small businesses. The utility said it will continue to tune settings and investments to balance safety with reliability, and that the heightened settings will be scaled back when conditions cool.
