On Monday afternoon, July 22, 1,241 members of Empire Electric, in the town of Cortez, experienced an electric outage.
At 3:54 p.m. some construction material being used for a project at the Cortez Middle School was caught in the wind and blown into the nearby overhead power lines. Two wires were knocked to the ground, causing that entire electrical circuit to shut down. Crews worked first to minimize the area of the outage by rerouting lines and restoring power to those members that were not in the immediate vicinity of the downed wires. Crews then isolated that particular section of line and repaired the damaged wires. Power was restored to everyone by 5:17 pm.
