DURANGO, Colo. - To maintain on-going repair efforts with the electrical outage in the Silver Pick/Purgatory area, LPEA officials have announced that the planned outages in the Red Mesa area have been canceled. Crews are being reassigned to the Silver Pick outage.

At approximately 8:42 p.m., Wednesday, March 5, 504 La Plata Electric customers in the Purgatory/Needles area lost power due to an unknown fault on the system.

Crews were dispatched and by 2:20 a.m. all but 34 customers between the lower ski area parking lot and Silver Pick had power restored because part of the electrical load was diverted to another circuit. These 34 customers remain out of power at this time.

Crews continue on scene searching for the fault, but are being hampered by the build up of snow, which in some areas is still roughly 8 ft. The lines in the area are buried, and the junction boxes are only 3 ft. high. LPEA has a backhoe on site to dig through the snow, but at this time the actual location of the fault and its cause are unknown.

More information will be dispatched as it becomes available.

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