Snow storm caused a power outage at Capilla

At 3pm on Saturday, March 16 power on Capilla failed due to heavy snow. A team visited the site
(after much effort and a snow cat ride) to survey the situation. They reported severe damage on the mountain top.
Trees down and blocking the road, large snow drifts, and at least 10 power poles down. Fortunately,
this time none of the down poles damaged our shack.

The site continued to operate on the standby generator but by now the generator is out of fuel.
The site will continue to run on batteries until they reach their cutoff voltage. However
without internet linking will not be possible.

It is likely to be weeks before power can be restored. A request for a fuel truck has been made but
given conditions it is not clear when one can be dispatched.

Here is a picture of the site.

Update:

As of Thursday morning 28 March.

Number one item is the commercial power is still off after 12 days since power failure. The latest info I have is that CNMEC is on the mountain restoring their distribution system BUT that is all we know at this time. We have no time line on when our site may be restored. The only good news that I can report is that when John Choc and Joe were able to get to our site the our service entrance for power appeared intact up to the weather-head which SHOULD allow power to be restored to the building, no estimate when that might Occure. indication on our power reserve is that when John C was up there wi had 19% fuel left in our tank. We don’t have a good estimate on how long that will sustain generator, We have a large battery backup of about 1KW that has allowed us to operate for over a week in the past before the low voltage cutout kicks in to prevent reserve battery destruction.

The latest info on the site is our repeater that is still functioning in repeat only mode, also i believe the D-Star is still up in repeat only mode. We have a report that Lobe’s internet system is sill working presumably on battery and or propane but they may be at risk if commercial power is not restored soon, the link to our site is down so we can’t monitor any of our remote sensors. We are planning a trip to the site as soon as we have confirmation of commercial power restoration to our shack, but this will be dependent on if we have 4WD access on roads to site. There is no reason to go untill power is restored since we are running out of backup power reserves. if we have no power there there is not much we could do. As far as propane delivery is concerned our and Specialie’s propane delivery company has been taken over by Amerigas and we have been unable to even contact them to get information on any deliveries to the site. The previous owners were at least answering their phone in the past. My view is we would like an alternate supplier but there are none that we know of. We had similar problems with Amerigas at the HUB and I was able to switch that service to Ortega’s which give excellent service and pricing but only deliver in the metro area.

Stand by for further updates when we get them, If anybody on the committee has info on Capilla site please share it.

Goodie

Harris Goodwin