Nearly 12 inches of snow fell on Eugene last week, snapping tree limbs, damaging power lines and knocking out electricity for thousands of area residents, according to a press release from the Eugene Water and Electric Board.
Lance Robertson, spokesman for EWEB, said most outages were concentrated in the south hills and north River Road areas, adding that a total of 3,000 EWEB customers were without power.
In the campus area, residents of H.P. Barnhart Hall and Riley Hall reported a brownout — a power reduction that cut out heat, hot water and most electronic appliances — at approximately 8 a.m. Thursday, said Mike Eyster, director of University Housing. Only the lights worked during the brownout, and crews restored full power to the building at midnight. By 10 a.m. the next morning, the hot water was also restored.
“I’m sure that some people were cold,” Eyster said, adding that there were only 15 residents in Barnhart Hall and eight in Riley Hall at the time of the outages. “About all we can do in a case like that is provide blankets to people who request them. To my knowledge, nobody requested any blankets. We did a lot better than some of the houses in Eugene.”
Robertson explained that lines damaged by falling limbs take longer to repair than transformers damaged by lightning, a more common cause of outages in Eugene.
Every year there are typically outages affecting 1,000 to 3,000 EWEB customers, usually caused by lightning. The last “huge” outage occurred during a storm in February 2002, when 30,000 customers were without power for up to six days, Robertson said.
“Whenever a tree or big limb falls across a power line it not only is dangerous, but it can take a long time to repair,” he said.
According to the press release, all major power restorations were completed Saturday night.
“We’re hoping the weather holds (while we restore power),” Robertson said. “If we get another storm, we could be going the other way.”
Wunderground.com, a comprehensive weather Web site, predicts it will snow this morning with temperatures in the 20s, which should turn to rain this afternoon and tonight as temperatures rise to the 30s.