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Park City waterworks station loses power, impacting snowmaking

A piece of Park City’s waterworks infrastructure suffered an electrical problem in the early morning hours on Monday, leaving the pump station without power and forcing the Public Utilities Department to temporarily shift the route of water through the system to ensure service continued without interruption.

The pump station is located on Euston Drive, in Prospector. The station moves water from the Boot Hill tank close to the Park City Cemetery on Kearns Boulevard to a location in lower Deer Valley, at the top of Deer Valley Resort’s Burns ski lift. The water serves the Snow Park area or is eventually pumped to the high-elevation Red Cloud neighborhood in Empire Pass.

Clint McAffee, the Public Utilities director for City Hall, said the pump station lost power on Sunday during an outage that struck Prospector. The Park City Police Department said the outage lasted approximately 5 ½ hours starting at approximately 5 p.m. Once the power was restored, the pump station began to operate again.



McAffee said a separate electrical incident that does not appear related to the outage occurred at approximately 4 a.m. on Monday. He said the incident at approximately 4 a.m. “basically fried” the motor controls of the pump station after a circuit was damaged. The pump station lost power at that time, he said.

The Police Department said in an online statement there was a report of smoke in the pump station. The Park City Fire District indicated the smoke was caused by the outage, the online statement said.



McAffee said a waterworks crew manually shifted the route of water through the system. The water was sent through a pump station just south of Daly Avenue instead of the one on Euston Drive.

He said, though, the Public Utilities Department was required to temporarily reduce the amount of snowmaking water available to Deer Valley Resort. The reduction remained in place Tuesday morning and was expected to remain in place through at least the middle of the week, McAffee said. The resort said the Deer Valley snowmaking staff was working with Park City officials, but details were not available.

McAffee said the snowmaking operation at Deer Valley was the only water customer impacted.

McAffee said the department plans to temporarily fix the electrical circuitry in the pump station on Euston Drive with a permanent repair and upgrade planned in April.


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