Power outage takes out most of Carson City

An equipment failure early Wednesday afternoon shut down Sierra Pacific Power Co.'s Brunswick substation and left three-fourths of Carson City without electricity for about an hour.

A connector that links a power line to a switch failed for unknown reasons, triggering an automatic shutdown of the entire substation at the east end of Carson City, Sierra Pacific spokesman Karl Walquist said.

Power was cut to 19,500 customers in Carson City at about 1 p.m. with electricity restored to 15,900 customers at about 2 p.m. after Sierra Pacific was able to switch service to out-of-town substations. About 3,600 customers along the Highway 50 East corridor had to wait for power until Brunswick was operational again at 3:30 p.m., Walquist said.

He said the outage was the largest in Sierra Pacific territory this summer.

About 6,000 customers in Carson City did not lose power but did experience a brief dimming of lights. The power outage spared customers in west Carson City and south of Koontz Lane, Walquist said.

Incline Village also lost power for about an hour because the Brunswick substation is the town's primary power source. An alternate power source from Kings Beach restored Incline's electricity at 1:54 p.m.

But a power outage didn't stop mayoral politics. The Pinon Plaza went dark because the hotel/casino doesn't have a generator, but the mayoral candidates' debate in the Plaza's old banquet area continued.

The Plaza slot machines also shut down, but that didn't deter most gamblers either.

"They were waiting at the machines for them to come back on," Pinon Plaza spokesman Sean Sever said. "Several people had to leave so we took their names. The slot machines have a three-year memory that keeps track of their credits."

Computers went down at Bank of America on William Street, but banking continued in improvised fashion.

"We did not close," a bank employee said. "We monitored the foot traffic. We let a limited number of people into the bank."

The outage came just after the lunch rush so the Sizzler on North Carson Street was not significantly affected.

"We stayed open running just the salad bar," manager Shane Frerking said. "People came in and we said we had only the salad bar, and they said, 'That's what we came for.'"

Albertsons on Highway 50 East relied on a generator for an hour and a half. Cash registers remained operational but the emergency lights provided more darkness than light.

"It was kind of like a moonlight sale," store manager Steve Wallace said. "If we would have known, we could have planned for it."

The IBM AS/400 computer and the Novell PC network at City Hall were shut down as a precaution, but the two other IBMs and five other Novell networks at other city locations kept operating with uninterrupted power supplies, according to William Naylor, the city's information services director.

"No files were corrupted or anything like that," Naylor said, adding that PCs didn't work during the outage.

The State of Nevada's main processors have emergency backup, so ongoing processes were undisturbed, said Marlene Lockard, director of the state Information Technology Department.

Computers on state employee desks were dead for about an hour. Did that cripple the state of Nevada? Not in Lockard's office, at least.

"I simply moved to returning phone calls. There's plenty of tasks that can be done that aren't computer related."