2,800 Lose Power Wednesday Afternoon – Were You One Of Them?
Wednesday afternoon Idaho Power reported that around 2,800 customers were without power as they worked to fix the problem. Affected areas included Shoshone and surrounding areas. Facebook painted the outage as having a much bigger reach. In the Magic Valley Classifieds group one man commented:
KMVT off the air? Seems like many of the stations from off the air have no signal.
This led to nearly 100 comments from people all around the Magic Valley claiming the issue had reached as far as Hagerman, Jerome, Kimberley, Buhl, Castleford, and one person in Twin Falls. That doesn't mean they were all without power, just that they were without power or their TV station was off air.
Another Facebook post claims that a boulder from a landslide hit a transmission line causing the outage and was affecting 25,000 people. That's a much higher number than the Idaho Power estimate. This is the kind of weird part - the outage map for Southern Idaho doesn't show anything happened as far as a power outage in the last 24 hours. There is also nothing currently on the Idaho Power map.
Also odd is that the subject came up because someone thought KMVT was off air and all radio stations had gone dead for a few minutes. As of now, KMVT hasn't said anything on their site about an outage or being off air.
I'm not saying it didn't happen as people seem to think it happened, but can all of the information put up on Facebook about the outage be true? Some even (jokingly I assume) blamed it on the Coronavirus.