{"id":36749,"date":"2022-12-16T22:18:23","date_gmt":"2022-12-17T05:18:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/power-outage-in-purgatory-metro-area-affects-1400-homes\/"},"modified":"2026-03-31T02:33:30","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T08:33:30","slug":"power-outage-in-purgatory-metro-area-affects-1400-homes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/power-outage-in-purgatory-metro-area-affects-1400-homes\/","title":{"rendered":"Power outage in Purgatory metro area affects 1,400 homes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"A
A power outage affected 1,400 homes in the Purgatory Metro District on Friday, including Purgatory Resort. (Courtesy of Audrey Royem)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Residents in the North Valley in the Purgatory Metro District had even chillier mornings than usual Friday, as the entire Purgatory substation went down around 7 a.m.<\/p>\n

Also affected was Purgatory Resort, which was not able to run its ski lifts during the power outage.<\/p>\n

\u201cCrews were up there by 7:20 a.m.,\u201d said LPEA spokeswoman Hillary Knox. \u201cSubstations are tricky when there\u2019s an outage that originates on the line. It\u2019s usually pretty easy to figure out what it is if there\u2019s a tree in the line or something visual that you can see. If there is nothing visual, we can just patrol the line. If it\u2019s clear, we can we can then reclose and turn the power back on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s power outage was not something as simple as a tree on the line, however, and many resident did not have their power restored for several hours.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen the origination of an outage is in the substation, it\u2019s really tricky because there are literally dozens and dozens and dozens of things that it could be,\u201d said Knox. \u201cIt\u2019s also incredibly dangerous because of the amount of current that\u2019s running through substations. It becomes a lot slower and a lot more tedious, and it just takes a lot more time to restore.\u201d<\/p>\n

Crews eventually found the problem, which was one of the transformers in the substation, Knox said, and residents in each area of the district slowly got their power back.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs of 2 p.m., everybody\u2019s power was restored,\u201d said Knox.<\/p>\n

Purgatory ski lifts are also running again, though there were complaints about the lack of communication to skiers and patrons.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo communication to pass holders,\u201d said Audrey Royem in an email to The Durango Herald<\/em>. \u201cDid they forget to pay the bill? Power outage?\u201d<\/p>\n

Purgatory lost power to the entire resort, including all of the businesses, and was forced to use backup generators.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven the backup generators died,\u201d said Purgatory retail and sales associate, Maggie Hendricks. \u201cA lot of cold people today, but most everyone was chill about the outage.\u201d<\/p>\n

Power was eventually restored at the ski resort by 1:40 p.m.<\/p>\n

molsen@durangoherald.com<\/a> <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

lifts were shut down for several hours.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":36750,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[28,712],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-36749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-headlines","tag-purgatory"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36749"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36749\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":83440,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36749\/revisions\/83440"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36749"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=36749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}