
Electric Outage: 1-844-484-2300
Water Emergency: 541-685-7595
EWEB Main: 541-685-7000
Using fireworks near power lines could lead to a fire, explosion, power outage or downed line.
Find Out MoreEWEB will continue the annual closure of our College Hill Reservoir over the Fourth of July holiday and prohibit fireworks on the property grounds.
Find Out MoreOn June 18, with the help of community neighbors, EWEB inaugurated a new emergency water station at the Lane County Fairgrounds.
Find Out MoreAs a public utility, it is important EWEB check in with customers to see how we are performing. We invite you to share your feedback and opinions.
Find Out MoreStarting late night Sunday night, an intense windstorm blew over trees and caused just over 2,600 Eugene Water & Electric Board customers to lose power. But EWEB line crews working through the dark hours of the night and early morning promptly restored service for nearly all those customers.
Find Out MoreTwo Eugene Water & Electric Board line crews will spend the New Year holiday weekend through next week restoring power to thousands of Pacific Gas & Electric customers in northeast California after winter storms dumped more than 10 feet of snow in the Lake Tahoe area starting before Christmas.
Find Out MoreSeveral hundred customers have been restored, but the smaller outages with five or fewer customers may not be restored until Tuesday or Wednesday.
Find Out MoreWith the National Weather Service predicting snow for the Eugene area Sunday through Tuesday, we want to remind customers that the expected snow could bring trees and branches down onto overhead power lines and cause electric outages.
Find Out MoreJust as high winds with gusts of more than 30 mph arrived in the Oregon Cascades early Thursday, EWEB has completed aerial trimming around its Carmen-Smith transmission line using a helicopter with saw attachments to trim branches and treetops.
Find Out MoreEWEB Leads "Spill Drill" to test HazMat Response
Find Out MoreHave you ever thought about where your drinking water comes from? What about where your wastewater goes?
Find Out MoreWhile most wildfires are started by lightning strikes or caused by human actions, utilities have a role to play in risk reduction -- and we are doing our part. And while we can’t stop wildfires, we can make our electric infrastructure more resilient to better withstand fires by using new construction methods and materials and keeping our system maintenance up to date by replacing aging equipment.
Find Out MoreAt EWEB, we factor climate change into almost everything we do. As Eugene’s publicly-owned utility, we strive to fulfill our roles reducing our community’s carbon footprint, optimizing our use of clean energy, and helping our watershed adapt to a warmer climate.
Find Out MoreIdeas for supplying and cooking during an emergency outage
Find Out MoreThe security of the community's water supply is tied directly to the health of the McKenzie Watershed and EWEB is investing in the long-term health and quality of life for residents for generations to come.
Find Out MoreFollowing the 2016 ice storm, we applied for grant funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to make resiliency improvements to our electric system to reduce the frequency and duration of storm-related outages in several areas prone to storm damage.
FEMA tightly controls how such grant money is spent, and our distribution engineering staff spent a great deal of time refining the projects and tailoring them to meet the agency's stringent requirements. Those efforts paid off when FEMA approved almost all of the projects in late 2017. Design work started last year.
The agency has thus far approved 15 of the 16 proposed reliability projects, and will fund 75 percent of the cost, estimated to be about $3 million. The final project should be approved later this spring. Click here to view a brochure and map of the projects.
A dozen of the reliability projects will involve reconfiguring older overhead power lines that now have two wires and replacing them with new, higher-capacity cable that requires only one wire. This will also allow for the removal of crossarms, which are susceptible to falling trees and limbs and a common culprit in an outage. Replacement of damaged crossarms is time-consuming and slows restoration efforts. In addition, some lines may be rerouted.
Four of the reliability projects will convert overhead lines to underground service. Some areas where undergrounding will occur include Blanton Road and East 50th Avenue between Willamette and Fox Hollow. We will hold public meetings to explain the projects and gather comments from those in neighborhoods where overhead to underground conversations are planned.
Most of the overhead projects that involve reconfiguring and replacing lines and removing crossarms will begin in the late spring of 2019. The underground conversions will take place in 2020 and 2021.
One of the questions we receive after winter storms damage the system by bringing down trees and overhead power lines is: Why doesn't EWEB put more power lines underground?
The explanation is a bit complicated.
One primary driver in considering overhead to underground conversion is cost. Placing overhead lines underground in established neighborhoods - around existing underground infrastructure such as water/sewer pipes and buildings - is expensive.
The cost to underground a transmission line, which serves thousands of customers, is around $500 per foot. To underground a primary feeder line, which serves several hundred up to more than a thousand customers, costs about $150 per foot.
Those estimates do not include the cost of negotiating easements on private property, nor the cost of the ground transformers that would be required. And it is the customer's responsibility to pay for converting to an underground meter base that connects to the house.
There also is additional cost to repair fences and landscaping after the underground work is completed, and some property owners don't want us digging up their backyards, or placing pad mount ground transformers in their front yards.
By comparison, overhead power lines are much less costly. An overhead transmission line costs about $150 per foot, and an overhead primary feeder line costs about $70 per foot. That $70 per foot drops even further when there are multiple circuits coming off the overhead feeder.
New developments already incorporate underground utilities during construction. When underground lines are installed as part of a new subdivision that is not already encumbered by buildings, streets, sidewalks and other infrastructure, it is much less expensive. Plus, the developer covers those installation costs.
While undergrounding electric lines tends to protect them during ice and snow storms, the lines can be difficult and time-consuming to repair when the underground cables fail.
When considering whether to underground power cables in areas that sustain significant damage when snow and ice bring down trees and lines, we consider the safety and reliability benefits against the costs.
4200 Roosevelt Blvd.
Eugene, OR 97402
800-841-5871
541-685-7000
Open Monday-Friday
Phone hours: 9 a.m. - 6:30 p.m.