News

Frost brings outages to rural area of county

By Scott Wagar

12/25/2012

With the heavy frost this past week in the area, it has caused some difficulties with electrical disturbances and outages in the rural areas in and around Bottineau County.

“We started having scattered outages over our whole system starting on Sunday,” said Bill Sadowsky of North Central Electric Co-op. “What is happening is that a little piece of frost will let go on a line and the wires will slap together, which causes the blinking of lights. Sometimes when the lines slap together we will get a conductor that will break because the lines will wrap and stay together too long and burn out.”

From the Peace Gardens to Newburg, and over to Landa, North Central line crews have been resetting breakers, reattaching lines and knocking frost off the wires.

The linemen saw an average mean of two inches of frost wrapped around the lines they where working on.

So far, Newburg and Landa have seen the worst of the electrical interruptions.

Sadowsky said that customers could expect more difficulties with the lines and should be prepared.

“Until it (frost) goes we could have more difficulties with the lines,” Sadowsky said.