For about two weeks in early 1954, fog hung over the high country around Arbon and froze onto the trees, shrubs and power lines. By February 10 the frost on the wires was four to eight inches thick and lines carrying 12,500 volts sagged almost to the ground. Repair crews were working at all hours to keep the power on. The Salt Lake Tribune reported it twice that week.
Electric service was then less than ten years old in the valley. The Firsts page dates its arrival to 1945 or 1947, depending on the account. A high-voltage line had crossed the valley long before that. The first power line through the valley was built in 1926–27 by Idaho Power and Utah Power and Light to join the American Falls power plant to the Wheelon plant in Utah, and for about twenty years it carried current past farms that had none.
Winter on the high line
One lineman remembered a winter repair near Arbon from those years. In December 1953 the Deseret News ran a feature on Mike Hansen, who had been a lineman and trouble shooter for Utah Power and Light in Salt Lake City for nearly twenty-five years. He recalled a blizzard in the 1930s that knocked out a high transmission line near American Falls. He and other linemen set out from Schiller, near Pocatello, with a caterpillar tractor and a bobsled. At 3 o'clock the next morning they were stuck in deep snow near Arbon (the digitized page seems to say four and a half feet), and it was 23 below zero.
They got the tractor going and reached a farmhouse, where the farmer let them in to get warm and gave them breakfast. Then he went with them to where the line was down. Hansen could not recall his name. The wind blew the post holes shut about as fast as the men could dig them. In the afternoon a company ski plane landed with word that another blizzard was coming. Once it was off again, the crew started for the ranch in the farmer's sleigh. When the storm struck they turned the team loose and huddled in the bottom of the sleigh. The next morning they went back and finished the job. The feature gives no year, and the line was probably the one that ran up the valley.
Christmas 1950
A few years after power reached the valley's homes, ice built up on its power lines at Christmas 1950. The Weather Bureau's Idaho summary for December 1950 noted heavy fog that month in many southern Idaho valleys, with fog on ten or more days at Malad. Ice on the wires caused considerable trouble for telephone and power lines, worst on December 25 and 26. In many areas the deposits reached an inch or more across. Around Malad and in Arbon Valley they grew to what the bulletin called "the unusual magnitude of approximately 5 inches" on the power lines. The bulletin says nothing about outages in the valley, and no newspaper report of that Christmas in the valley has been found.
The 1953 feature on Mike Hansen also mentions a "glacial fog" that crippled Utah Power and Light lines in mountain country, with ice up to eight inches across on the wire. Some of the men went as long as 46 hours without rest, and Hansen and 119 others were honored for it at the Edison Electric Institute's 1951 convention. The article does not say where that fog was, so whether it was the same December weather is not known.
February 1954
The Tribune's first report came from Arbon and was printed on Thursday, February 11, 1954, under the headline "Frozen Fog on Wires Causes Serious Damage in Idaho." A picture of the damage at Arbon ran with it. The report said trouble-shooting crews had worked at all hours on Wednesday to keep up the power lines in Arbon and the districts around it, where the lingering fogs were doing heavy damage. The fogs had hung over the high mountain country for about two weeks. They were laden with moisture, which clung to the wires and froze into a crust four to eight inches thick, and the paper estimated the load on the lines at one and a half to two pounds for every foot.
Conditions changed by the hour with the temperature. Sometimes a rap on a wire knocked off its whole load of frost and ice. At other times the load fell away when the air stirred as the fog lifted. The lines carrying 12,500 volts could sag almost to the ground without much harm, but when the wind swayed the heavy wires the damage began. Poles broke, lines went out of service, and repair crews went out into the severe weather to restore service. Freed of the weight, the lines went back into place, though officials said they were no longer as tight as when first strung.
Three days later, in its Sunday round-up of the week's news from Utah and the neighboring states, the Tribune reported that frost had piled up to 17 inches on utility lines in Arbon Valley as the moisture-laden fog kept up its "tenacious" hold. Trouble-shooters from Utah Power and Light and from Idaho Power were keeping watch in the area to maintain service, and the frosted trees and shrubs had become "eerie fantasies."
What the papers leave out
Neither report names anyone from the valley, says how many homes lost power or for how long, or tells when the fog lifted. The Tribune named the two companies whose trouble-shooters were on watch, but not which company or co-operative served the valley's homes, which is still an open question on this site. The digitized text of the first report is jumbled and has lost its figure for the heaviest frost, so the 17 inches comes from the Sunday item.
The story as reported
Salt Lake Tribune, February 11, 1954, page 26. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
ARBON, Idaho, Feb. 10 — Ice and frost left by two weeks of freezing fog damaged power lines, trees and shrubs in and around Arbon Valley, and line crews were on the job day and night Wednesday trying to keep the electricity flowing.
The fog had settled over the high mountain country about two weeks earlier and stayed. Its moisture clung to the wires and froze, building coats of frost and ice four to eight inches thick. The weight on the lines was put at roughly one and a half to two pounds for each foot of wire.
Lines carrying 12,500 volts bowed nearly to the ground under the load. That alone did little harm, but wind set the heavy wires swinging, and then poles snapped. Each broken pole took a line out of service, and crews had to go out in hard weather to put it back.
How much ice hung on a line changed from hour to hour as the temperature rose and fell. A single knock on a wire could sometimes shake the whole coating loose. At other times the load came off by itself when the fog lifted and the air began to move.
Once the weight dropped away, the wires sprang back into position. Power officials said, however, that the lines no longer hung as taut as they had when they were new.
On this site: the Firsts page also tells of George Bradley's water wheel and the home light plants that came before the power lines, and the Bolingbroke family history remembers the coming of electricity and the valley's first television in 1952.