What happened in the Washington County power outage?

The Washington County power outage hit most of the county on Thursday evening. If you were here for it, you already know the broad strokes. If you are watching from somewhere else — and a fair number of people reading this are considering a move down here — here is a straight account of what is actually confirmed.

I am going to be careful in this piece about the line between what utilities have stated and what is still being worked out, because at the time of writing the cause has not been established.

What happened, and when

The outage began shortly after 5 p.m. on Thursday, August 27, 2026.

By 6:15 p.m., St. George News reported roughly 41,000 customers without power — about 27,200 Dixie Power customers and about 13,500 Rocky Mountain Power customers. Washington City Power and St. George Energy Services were also affected.

Those counts moved around through the evening as crews worked, which is normal in an event like this. Different outlets captured different moments. At its worst, tracking site poweroutage.us put Washington County around 90% of customers out — which matches how it felt to anyone driving through town.

What caused it

This is the part worth being precise about.

Dixie Power attributed the outage to the failure of a significant asset within PacifiCorp’s transmission system, which serves electric utilities throughout Washington County. In plain terms: the problem was upstream of the local utilities, on the high-voltage system that feeds the entire county.

St. George News reported that the breakers feeding Washington County tripped open at the main grid station, which PacifiCorp owns and operates. Rocky Mountain Power pointed to a substation issue.

Dixie Power was direct that the origin sat outside its own system and that it had not received confirmed information about the specific cause. Rocky Mountain Power indicated a full determination could take several days, possibly up to a week, since engineers need to review the equipment thoroughly.

So: the mechanism is understood — the county’s transmission feed opened — but the root cause is not yet public. Anyone telling you definitively why it happened is ahead of the utilities.

Why it took as long as it did

Transmission outages are a different animal from a downed line in a neighborhood. Dixie Power described them as complex to restore, requiring coordination to bring the system back safely.

You cannot simply flip the county back on at once. Restoring a large system in a single step risks damaging equipment and causing another failure, so power comes back in stages.

That is why Rocky Mountain Power’s early estimates ran to the small hours of Friday morning, and why crews were working two tracks at the same time. Dixie Power’s chief operating officer, Colin Jack, described it as running two processes in parallel while PacifiCorp worked to restore the county as a whole.

The rolling blackouts

Around 9:30 p.m. Thursday, Dixie Power began rotating power rather than restoring it everywhere at once.

The reason was capacity. With the main feed down, Dixie Power reported having enough to serve roughly a quarter of its normal load. Rotating that supply — areas getting power for about an hour at a time, roughly every four hours — spread a limited resource around instead of leaving most of the county dark while a fraction stayed lit.

Hospitals, critical care facilities and emergency services were prioritized, which is standard and correct.

What it actually disrupted

A few concrete things, all confirmed:

Traffic. St. George Police reported ten accidents by 8:29 p.m., against a typical two or three on a Thursday evening. Dark signals are genuinely dangerous, and this is the single most useful thing to take from the whole event: treat a dead traffic light as a four-way stop, every time.

Events. Tuacahn Amphitheatre canceled its performance of Les Misérables.

Cooling. Ivins opened City Hall as a cooling center. In late August here, that is not a small detail — losing air conditioning in a Washington County summer is the part of an outage that actually carries risk, which is a large part of what living with this climate involves.

When it ended

Both major utilities had restored all of their customers by Friday morning. Rocky Mountain Power had begun restoring in stages by around 9 p.m. Thursday once initial assessments indicated it was safe to do so.

By any reasonable measure that is a fast recovery for a county-wide transmission failure. Roughly overnight, in high heat, with crews from multiple utilities coordinating.

What is still open

The cause. That is genuinely it, and it matters — a one-off equipment failure and a systemic capacity problem are very different stories, and right now nobody has said publicly which this was.

I would rather tell you that than fill the gap with a guess. If a determination is published, I will update this piece.

If you are moving here and this worried you

That is a fair reaction, and it deserves a real answer rather than reassurance. I have written it out separately: does this change anything about moving to Washington County?

The short version is that one outage is an event, not a pattern — but there is a genuine point buried in it that is worth understanding before you buy.

Where this came from

I do not have inside information, and I have not attributed anything to the utilities that they did not say. This piece is built from:

• St. George News — outage scale, PacifiCorp attribution, rolling blackout detail, Colin Jack’s comments, Ivins cooling center
• FOX 13 News — restoration timing, Dixie Power’s statement on origin, St. George Police accident figures
• The Salt Lake Tribune — county-wide scale
• poweroutage.us — customer percentages

If you lost food, had a medical device go down, or are just wondering what to keep on hand next time, the practical guide is here.

And if you have questions about any of this as it relates to a home you own or are considering here, ask me directly.

What it meant in practice

The part that matters locally is not the event itself but what losing power means in this climate.

In a hot month, an outage is a cooling problem before it is anything else. A closed, shaded house holds its temperature longer than people expect, and an open one does not. For anyone heat-sensitive, that is the genuine risk rather than the inconvenience.

Households on a private well had a second problem: no power means no pump, and therefore no water. That is a materially different situation from being on a municipal supply, and it is the kind of thing people discover during an event rather than before one.

What to take from it as a resident

How to prepare for an outage here covers the practical list, and most of it is unglamorous: water, a plan for cooling, charged devices, a way to get information, and knowing where you would go if the house became too warm.

The house-level version is worth more thought. Shade, insulation, the efficiency of the cooling system and whether you are on a well all change how an outage actually feels. Those are things you choose at purchase and live with for years, which makes them worth noticing while you are still looking.

What to take from it if you are deciding whether to move here

Keep it in proportion. Whether an event like this should change your thinking about relocating is the honest answer, and the short version is that every region has something and the comparison that matters is against where you are now rather than against somewhere with no risks at all.

What should weigh more in that decision: the summer, which is a permanent feature rather than an incident; the water conversation; and the job market if you need one locally.

An outage is an event. Those three are conditions, and conditions are what you actually live with.

— Kelsey Earl, Realtor, Keller Williams South Valley