The small town between Medford and Ashland saw 70 power outages this summer.
The so-called 鈥渆nhanced safety settings鈥� are meant to help prevent wildfires during the hottest part of the year, and those changes disproportionately affected Talent in the Rogue Valley.
Those outages frustrated many residents, including business owners who said their bills skyrocketed as a result of big power fluctuations. Many also thought the way the utility communicated these power grid settings to customers was inadequate.
Pacific Power spokesperson Simon Gutierrez defended the company鈥檚 communication, saying after learning about the situation in Talent, they immediately began meeting with the mayor and city manager.
鈥淲hich ultimately culminated in a community meeting where the president of Pacific Power went in front of the townspeople of Talent, took their questions, answered them to the best of his abilities, and promised that we would try to do better, even better than we had already done in terms of communication," said Gutierrez.
Gutierrez said during that meeting, the company learned about more modes of communication they could be using to ensure they reach every customer. That鈥檚 something they plan on doing next year, when the enhanced safety settings get turned on again.
Gutierrez said now that the season is over, they鈥檒l look at what worked and what didn鈥檛.
鈥淭here's a review of our systems and our settings, and if there's adjustments identified that can be made to minimize impact on customers, we go ahead and recommend that those adjustments be made," he said.
The company already made significant changes to the Talent power grid during fire season that reduced the size, frequency and length of outages. That includes installing fault indicators that help lineworkers identify where the fault happened, and "reclosers" that divide up the power grid into smaller pieces to reduce the number of people affected.
According to Gutierrez, There were 10 outages that happened in the month of October, before the enhanced safety settings were turned off.
