BULLHEAD CITY – On Wednesday, November 6, at 6:04 a.m. the high winds blew debris into an MEC substation causing damage to the energized equipment. This outage affected 19,952 Mohave Electric Cooperative (MEC) members in the Bullhead City and Fort Mohave areas of the western service territory. Once the crews cleared the debris, they isolated the equipment to make repairs and used switching to restore power to affected members. At 6:39 a.m. 15,745 members were restored. Once further switching and repairs were done 1,172 members were restored at 7:21 a.m. and the remaining 3,035 members were restored at 7:22 a.m.
Switching is rerouting power to restore electricity to members as soon as possible. The areas affected had redundancy built into the system so that crews were able to use switching to reroute the power as quickly as they did.