City of Powell residents will be without power for roughly six hours on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.

The city’s electricity is scheduled to be shut off from 11:50 p.m. Tuesday to 6 a.m. Wednesday, while a power supplier upgrades its infrastructure.

Residents in rural Powell will not be affected.

The Western Area Power Administration (WAPA) is temporarily killing the power so it can safely install new overhead fiber optic lines across the tap that delivers electricity to the city. The spot is located near the sewer lagoons, northeast of town.

WAPA — a government agency that delivers electricity from hydropower dams to customers across the West — says it’s in the process of installing fiber optics across its Rocky Mountain area lines.

“Installing this fiber will improve WAPA’s facility-to-facility communications over time and, as a result, we believe will bring increased reliability to the grid throughout the larger Big Horn Basin area,” said Stephen Collier, a WAPA spokesman.

While WAPA is installing its new infrastructure Tuesday night, the city’s electric workers plan to take advantage of the outage by performing some work of their own.

Electric Superintendent Steve Franck said he and his crew will be “doing all the maintenance we possibly can,” including checking all the switches around town and at the substation.

Franck is assuming that WAPA will need the whole six hours to complete the work, “but we’ll be in contact with them,” he said, “so if they get done early we’ll turn it [the power] back on early.”

The city had to schedule a series of outages in 2021 and 2022 while crews overhauled the substation, but that work has been completed and the city doesn’t have any planned outages in the works.

“We’re doing well,” Franck said.