It took until Tuesday morning for Liberty Utilities to restore power to all of its customers after wind gusts between 130-150 mph along the Sierra Crest knocked over power poles and toppled trees onto electrical wires.

Liberty services the California side of the basin, as well as Truckee, Alpine and Mono counties. NV Energy provides power on the Nevada side.

“Basically, crews have been working nonstop since the first storm arrived on Friday,” Mike Smart, Liberty Utilities-CA president, said in a statement. “For the past four days, we’ve reset poles, restrung wire and even made repairs to another utility’s infrastructure because it affected our ability to serve our customers.”

Approximately 16,400 Liberty customers were affected. When NV Energy has issues, Liberty has problems because the energy comes from NV.

Around South Lake Tahoe, there were three broken poles and six spans of electrical wire down due to trees falling, mostly in the Camp Richardson area. There were other smaller outages around town.

Tree related issues affected Tahoe City, the Truckee River corridor, and Glenshire as well as the communities of Portola, Loyalton, Hobart Mills, Russell Valley and Sierra Brooks in Plumas and Sierra counties. Two transmission lines serving that area went down at separate times. The 609-power line that runs from the Truckee substation to the Squaw Valley substation along Highway 89 was restored on Sunday morning. The 132-power line running parallel and to the east of the 609-power line went down on Sunday evening and wasn’t restored until Tuesday morning.

Liberty’s crews replaced nine downed power poles in the Coleville/Walker region in Mono County. Other repairs were made to poles that had wires downed and/or cross-arms on the poles broken by toppled trees.

— Lake Tahoe News staff report