Delivery truck knocks down two power poles, damages three others

A delivery truck snagged a low-hanging power line connected to an electrical pole late Monday morning in Yuma, knocking out power to more than 800 APS customers.

"It actually took down two of our poles," said APS spokeswoman Andrea Bereznak. "Due to the effect of the lines being pulled a second pole went down also."

According to Bereznak, a Fed-Ex truck making deliveries in the area, snagged the cable at about 11:31 a.m. at the corner of Bonanza Avenue and 32nd Street.

"It also broke the top off of one of the poles," Bereznak said. "There are some large commercial customers in the outage area also, including Wal-mart and some car dealerships."

The outage affected 855 customers and extended from Avenue A East to Pacific Avenue, and from 36th Street, North to Palo Verde Street.

Crews from APS quickly responded to the scene and rerouted power around the downed lines in order to restore electricity to most of the customers within the hour, Bereznak said.

Bereznak said as of 12:30 p.m., power was restored to all but 15 customers. Those customers, she said, were all commercial customers.

"(APS) works very hard to create redundancy in the system so that when uncontrollable outages occur, such as this accident, we are able to restore power with as brief as a disruption as possible to our customers," Bereznak said.

Bereznak said APS originally expected to have power restored to the remaining 15 customers by 7 p.m. Monday evening, but have since said it will take much longer.

"Our work crews will have to do more extensive work than we first thought," Bereznak said. "But we will work around the clock to make the necessay repairs and get their power restored."

The reason for the now prolonged outage, Bereznak said, is that work crews discovered that three other power poles were broken at the base during the accident.

James Gilbert can be reached at jgilbert@yumasun.com or 539-6854.