Utility crews worked Friday to repair a transmission line that collapsed earlier in the day, leaving an estimated 10,000 people in the Jackson Hole valley temporarily without power.
Power to much of Jackson was restored roughly four hours after the line collapsed at 5 a.m., but people living north and west of the resort town weren't expected to have their electricity back before noon Friday.Dick Riddle, an official with the Lower Valley Power and Light Cooperative, blamed the outage on frigid temperatures that plunged as low as 40 degrees below zero early Friday morning.
"What happened is it got so cold that the transmission line between Jackson and Teton Village, I guess, the line went down to the ground and broke, a cross arm broke," Riddle said.
"What happens is those lines got so cold they contracted and it broke a cross arm that the line is hanging onto -it broke it right off- that put it right to the ground," he said.
The outage left people from Alpine Junction south of Jackson all the way north to Yellowstone National Park without electricity, Riddle said.
The Jackson Hole Ski Resort delayed its operations Friday because of the outage, but by afternoon the lifts were running again.