Powell area residents can expect to lose power between roughly midnight and 2 a.m. early Sunday morning.

The Western Area Power Administration — which supplies power to the City of Powell and other local electrical providers — is shutting off the electricity to perform maintenance on the North Cody to Lovell 69-kilovolt power line, said Eric Barendsen, a public affairs specialist with WAPA.

The planned outage is expected to last about two hours.

Meanwhile, two recent WAPA outages in and around Powell were not planned.

A bird knocked out power for about 5,000 to 6,000 customers in the area on Thursday morning. At about 5:15 a.m., the avian hit a high-voltage transmission line belonging to WAPA. That activated protection system relays and tripped circuit breakers, Barendsen said. “It’s basically a safety device.”

When the circuit breakers were tripped, that took a transformer offline at the Lovell substation.

A WAPA crew from Cody traveled to the substation, inspected the transformer and restored power about 6:15 a.m.

The prior week, the area had experienced a roughly half-hour outage that resulted from an equipment failure at WAPA’s North Cody Substation.

—By Kevin Killough