Protecting Your Power, Preventing Fires, and A Call To Action: Extra Precautions During Red Flag Warnings

Posted: August 1, 2025

Afton, WYOMING – Red Flag warnings, issued by the National Weather Service, are taken extremely seriously by your energy cooperative. When the winds, temperature, and humidity reach the right mix, wildfire risk is greatly heightened.

At Lower Valley Energy, Red Flag Warnings place your cooperative on high alert.  While we continue to be proactive in preparedness for severe weather, fires, and outages, during particularly dangerous weather conditions we will be placing our system on more sensitive settings. These heightened periods of awareness could cause more blinks, and/or longer outages, or even power shutoffs in high-risk areas.

Under normal, everyday operations, you might experience a “blink” if there is trouble in your area of the grid. The system would normally try to immediately restore power through the use of “reclosers.”

Normally, our system uses automatic devices called reclosers to quickly restore power after a minor interruption. However, during Red Flag Warnings, we temporarily disable these reclosers to reduce the risk of sparking a wildfire. This means that even a small issue could result in a power outage until we can manually verify the safety of the system. There will be more possible blinks and slower power restoration during these heightened periods. To ensure safety, we will carefully inspect the power grid before restoring power after an outage. This may take longer than usual.

As a cooperative member, we need your help. If you see something, say something. Trees in the line, a flash with our equipment, etc. We can all help to keep our community safe and our grid reliable.

We understand that power interruptions can be inconvenient, and we appreciate your patience and cooperation during these critical times. Your safety and the protection of our community are our top priorities.