Bonneville Power Administration has walked back plans to cut power to Oregon’s least populous county during multiple 14-hour intervals this summer, following a barrage of frustration and concern from residents.

The Portland-based federal power marketing agency, which sells wholesale electricity to utilities across the Pacific Northwest, had planned four outages in Wheeler County, located northeast of Bend.

Each outage was slated to run from 7 p.m. on Fridays through 9 a.m. the following day, across the county during July, August and September, while new equipment was installed at a local substation.

However, the announcement earlier this month infuriated Wheeler County residents, who felt they didn’t receive enough notice for outages that could severely hamper the rural county’s remote communities during the heart of its tourism season.

“It probably never even occurred to them that our whole business, our whole tourism industry, is being disrupted,” said Aruna Jacobi, owner of Painted Hills Vacation, a collection of vacation rentals in Mitchell.

After a series of phone calls and letters from the community, the power authority announced Wednesday that it has canceled the first three of the four scheduled outages. The agency will also review the timing and duration of the final outage, currently scheduled for Sept. 7-8, over the next two weeks.

“We’re working hard and making accommodations to be sympathetic to the community,” said John Tyler, public affairs specialist for Bonneville Power Administration.

Tyler said BPA has been working on the project since at least last fall. He said the project would replace equipment at the substation located outside Fossil, some of which is more than 50 years old.

The upgrade will ultimately improve the stability and reliability of the system for a rural county that experiences periodic outages, Tyler said.

In larger communities, this type of work can be done without significantly disrupting the power grid. However, in Wheeler County — Oregon’s least populous, with only three incorporated cities and fewer than 1,500 residents as of the 2010 census — the system lacks the redundancy needed to continue supplying power while the new equipment is installed, according to Tyler.

“In a rural community, these impacts are more acute,” he said.

Tyler said the agency prefers to complete this work prior to winter, when snow and ice can make installations treacherous. However, the dates BPA initially selected, four Friday nights and Saturday mornings in late July, August and September, fell during the heart of the region’s summer tourism season, an increasingly important part of the county’s economy.

Jacobi said she gets a lot of visitors who drive over from the Willamette Valley for long weekends to see the Painted Hills and other sights in the area. Frequently, air conditioning is a priority, as is having refrigeration for food they bring. The planned outage would have meant neither is available for a 14-hour interval.

“The power goes out often, and we deal with it, but it’s typically for four to six hours,” Jacobi said. “How is it going to be manageable?”

Patrick Farrell, co-owner of Spoke’n Hostel in Mitchell, added that most of his visitors are cyclists who are less concerned about air conditioning but said that heat will be a factor in the community during a summer power outage. Daytime highs in Wheeler County routinely exceed 90 degrees, and sometimes reach triple digits, and Farrell expressed concern about the elderly and ill in the community.

Roberta Vandehey, who lives outside of Fossil, added that timing was a factor as well. She said she and other Fossil residents heard about the first proposed outage, originally slated for Friday, about a week prior, giving them basically no time to prepare.

“I don’t think this would have happened if there had been even a little bit of communication,” Vandehey said.

Together, Vandehey and Jacobi led the charge to get BPA to reconsider the summer outages. Jacobi said she called everyone from Columbia Basin Electric Co-op, which supplies power to about 240 residents in north Wheeler County, to U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore.

She said employees from BPA and the local electric cooperative were cooperative and helpful. Thomas Wolff, general manager of Columbia Basin Electric, said he understood the frustrations from Wheeler County.

“A three- to four-hour outage is annoying; a 14-hour outage is unacceptable,” Wolff said.

Despite the frustration, some Wheeler County residents tried to make the best of the proposal. Tiger Town Brewing Co., a brewery based on Mitchell’s main street, had planned to throw a party during the July outage with barbecue and beer, and to set up a generator to screen the 1922 horror film “Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror,” according to Eric Charapata, co-founder of the brewery. Even with the outage canceled, he said the party is still on.

“We’re from here; we’re used to this,” Charapata said of the outage. “This is not that uncommon out here in the hinterlands.”

— Reporter: 541-617-7818, shamway@bendbulletin.com