Powell residents can expect a particularly dark night on Tuesday, April 22.

To accommodate some maintenance work by a power supplier, all of the city’s electricity will be shut off from 11:30 p.m. on the 22nd to roughly 5 a.m. on the 23rd.

The outage will allow the Wyoming Municipal Power Agency (WMPA) to replace a rotting power pole north of Powell High School. It is possible to replace a pole while the line is still “hot,” but some contractors — including the one selected by WMPA — won’t do that kind of work while the electricity is online, said City Electric Superintendent Steve Franck.

Although the outage is meant to assist WMPA, city crews also plan to take advantage of the outage by operating switches inside the substation and fixing some old wiring around the city, Franck said.

The city’s last planned outage occurred almost exactly a year ago so a different power supplier, the Western Area Power Administration, could install new fiber optic lines near the city’s sewer lagoons.

Franck noted that both the upcoming citywide outage and the one that took place last April stemmed from outside power suppliers.

“We have very minimal outages,” he said of the city — particularly compared to six or seven years ago.

Powell is one of eight communities around the state that govern and receive electricity from the Wyoming Municipal Power Agency. The others are Cody, Fort Laramie, Guernsey, Lingle, Lusk, Pine Bluffs and Wheatland.