A July 2 power outage that put millions in the dark from Texas to British Columbia left western bankers hot but generally unbothered.
The outage- which lasted from a few minutes to several hours and appears to have begun in Oregon, just over the California border- made its mark across the region.
Power company officials in the affected states said Monday that though they were still not sure what had triggered the event, a faulty transmission line from a Wyoming power plant was being investigated.
Dan G. Simkins, president of Bank of Eastern Idaho in Idaho Falls, said things got pretty hot without any air-conditioning. "We locked the doors for security purposes, the phones didn't ring ... we were pretty well isolated," he said. "But all it really did was inconvenience our business customers.
Mr. Simkins said the power went out around 2:25 p.m., so most business customers couldn't make deposits and had to use the night drop "or just take their money home and put it under their mattress."
A crew came in and worked on processing from 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., Mr. Simkins said. The next day, tellers were busy taking care of what would have been the previous day's work.
In eastern Oregon, the power went off just before 2 p.m. Michelle D. Sherman, director of marketing at Pioneer Bank in Baker City, said all but two of its branches were without power - and those two were inoperable, because Pioneer's main computer was down.
The bank locked its doors until power came back on around 4 p.m. Pioneer stayed open till 5, its normal closing time, and managed serve most of the customers turned away during the outage, Ms. Sherman said. However, the power in its Ontario, Idaho, branch - in the Mountain time zone - wasn't restored until after closing time.
BankAmerica, San Francisco, which has nearly 2,000 branches in a 10- state western region, lost power to only 65 offices, spread over Nevada, Idaho, California, and Oregon, said a spokeswoman, Betty Reiss.
