​​It started out as an ordinary outage: 300 homes and businesses without power early in the morning of March 23, 1985, a Sunday. Ordinary, but only for a distribution system that had been dealing with flooded right-of-ways and substations for four years.

“We got to the substation and found all three circuit breakers open. The substation was underwater, so we didn't want to close them," said Carl Youngstrom, line foreman at Harney Electric Cooperative in southeastern Oregon. “As we got farther down the line, we realized the problem was bigger than we anticipated. We got to the Narrows, and the transmission line was laying in the water."

For the next 12 hours, Youngstrom and his three-man crew worked to get the lights back on in this rural area they had gotten to know too well. Above-average snowfalls, wet springs and rainy summers in the early 1980s had caused two huge lakes to rise as much as three and a half feet each year, flooding roads, rangeland, homes, businesses and Harney Electric lines and equipment.

This time, strong winds overnight had shifted 25-foot chunks of ice and toppled seven transmission poles, cutting off Harney Electric's grid from its power source, Bonneville Power Administration.

The flooding had connected Malheur Lake to Harney Lake through much-smaller Mud Lake (the Narrows) making one big body of water. The three Oregon lakes are shallow, marshy high desert lakes that have expanded and contracted throughout time. They are situated about 20 miles south of the co-op's headquarters near Burns, the biggest town in southeastern Oregon.

Harney County Judge Dale White estimated the floods caused more than $32 million in property damage each year, a fact that prompted Oregon Governor Victor Atiyeh to declare the communities surrounding the lakes a disaster area. Thirty ranches had been destroyed, buildings and land. The Union-Pacific Railroad track and lengthy sections of two state highways washed out. Harney Electric lost 725 poles.

In some locations, “there's nothing even floating around to indicate there was ever a power line there," Youngstrom noted.

Board President Nevin Thomson, a cattle rancher, experienced the flooding first hand, pulling cattle out of mud and helping his son deal with the arsenic that contaminated his well.

“We've never had problems like this," he said.

For General Manager Jack Heaston, the flooding was a numbers game—big numbers with dollar signs. Rerouting transmission lines around the lakes would cost $35 million and require a 17 percent retail rate increase. He preferred another option: spend $80,000 to build a temporary substation on the northern end of the co-op's service territory and contract to use an Idaho Power Company transmission line.

Harney Electric consumers had already swallowed a 5 percent rate increase to cover the $200,000 cost of replacing destroyed lines. Heaston predicted a 10.9 percent rate increase if the water rose another five feet and 16.5 percent if it rose another 10 feet.

Meanwhile, Youngstrom's crew spent most of its time stabilizing lines whose poles stood in water. This meant reaching the poles by boat in summer and by snowmobile in winter. The men used their homemade “anchor machine" to straighten leaning poles by screwing steel anchors for guy wires into the mud below the water.