On December 8, 2009, a winter storm rolled into the Valley. The extremely high winds that accompanyed the storm caused several outages throughout the Valley.

Anthony Lobato, operations superintendant, said, "We had two major outages. One in San Acacio that involved four transmission poles being broken. The crews worked three days restoring these poles in very hard conditions."

Lobato continued, "The second major outage occured on Wolf Creek. Wolf Creek received up to four feet of snow and crews had to snowshoe in to remove trees from the line."

It took an extremely long time to reach some of the damaged sections of line. Crew members took turns breaking trail and in one situation, it took about 3 hours for the crew to travel just under a mile uphill through chest-deep fresh powder on snowshoes. Crews had to pack repair equipment, climbing spurs, saws and other tools to repair the problems.

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