Tuesday, September 5, 2017

Bonneville Power Administration Coordinating with U-S Forest Service on Eagle Creek Fire (Bonneville Power Administration)

No BPA utility customers are without power from this fire

Portland, Ore. – The Bonneville Power Administration is actively working to ensure we keep the power flowing throughout the Pacific Northwest while working with emergency responders and communities affected by the Eagle Creek Fire located 60 miles east of Portland, Ore.
BPA is coordinating its transmission actions with the Forest Service Fire Management Team 6 in order to safely take lines and facilities out of service (de-energize and re-energize) in order to provide fire crews with safe access to fight the wildfire while maintaining the reliability of the BPA transmission system.
Currently, we have only one line out of service – North Bonneville-Hood River 115-kilovolt line from Acton Substation to Cascade Locks. All other lines are in service. BPA has a robust, high voltage transmission system with the ability to route power along multiple paths for much of its service territory throughout the Pacific Northwest. No BPA customers are experiencing outages from BPA service at this time.
With the fire expanding to the Washington side of the Columbia River, we are closely monitoring transmission corridors in the vicinity of the fires. A useful resource for tracking the fire relative to BPA’s transmission system can be found at:

Previously, we de-energized Acton Substation at 8:50 p.m. on Monday at the request and in coordination with the City of Cascade Locks. Working with Cascade Locks, we re-energized the substation at 10:04 p.m. It remains in service at this time.

Additionally, BPA’s Knight-Ostrander 500-kilovolt line automatically went out of service due to heavy smoke on the northern portion of the line at 9:21 p.m. Monday. The line was left out of service until the fire safely burned through underneath. The line was re-energized at 7:12 a.m. this morning.