KEC officials determine cause of Sunday outage

Officials have determined that a fallen tree caused the Kootenai Electric Cooperative outage around 2 p.m. Sunday. The outage primarily affected customers in Hayden and lasted approximately two hours before service was restored to all around 4 p.m. 

"We understand the impact outages can have on our members, particularly during dry and hot conditions, KEC spokesperson Erika Neff said. "KEC works to minimize the number and duration of outages. Our top priority is the safety of our community."

According to KEC, crews and fire personnel responded quickly to the outage, extinguishing a small brush fire near the reported location before patrolling the affected line and confirming it was safe to reenergize. 

As a part of KEC's Wildfire Mitigation Plan, the automatic reenergization of the KEC electrical system was disabled due to weather and other conditions. 

"In this instance, the system operated as designed, allowing crews to quickly isolate the affected area and reduce wildfire risk," Neff said.