County annual report · FIPS 30089
2016 Sanders County, MT Power Outage Report
In 2016, customers in Sanders County, MT went without power for an average of 0.0 hours, a total of 61 customer-hours (Montana average 1.8 hours). That ranks 7th worst of 8 Montana counties and 2329th of 2,391 nationally.
Compared with MT, the US and 2015
Coverage line is EAGLE-I's share of Montana customers tracked each year.
Biggest outages in Sanders County, 2016
The 3 outage episodes with the most customers out at once. Times are UTC.
| # | Started (UTC) | Ended (UTC) | Duration | Peak out | Customer-hours |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | August 31, 2016 05:15 | August 31, 2016 05:45 | 30m | 23 | 12 |
| 2 | March 1, 2016 17:00 | March 1, 2016 21:45 | 4h 45m | 9 | 41 |
| 3 | July 19, 2016 14:30 | July 19, 2016 23:30 | 9h | 1 | 9 |
Outage episodes by size in 2016: 0 reached 100+ customers, 0 reached 1,000+ customers, 0 reached 10,000+ customers.
Utility reliability filed with the EIA
SAIDI (average outage time per customer) and SAIFI (average interruptions per customer) that utilities serving Sanders County reported on EIA Form 861 for 2016, or their most recent earlier filing. Utility-wide figures, not county-specific.
| Utility | EIA year | SAIDI | SAIFI | SAIDI excl. major events | SAIFI excl. major events |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NorthWestern Energy LLC - (MT) | 2016 | 2.4 hrs | 1.21 | 1.9 hrs | 1.07 |
| Avista Corp | 2016 | 2.2 hrs | 0.88 | 2.2 hrs | 0.88 |
| Flathead Electric Coop Inc | 2016 | 3.3 hrs | 1.49 | 3.1 hrs | 1.43 |
| NorthWestern Energy | - | - | - | - | - |
| Northern Lights, Inc | - | - | - | - | - |
| USBIA-Mission Valley Power | - | - | - | - | - |
About this data
- Outage figures come from DOE/ORNL EAGLE-I, which records customers out by county every 15 minutes. EAGLE-I tracked about n/a of Montana's customers in 2016; utilities it does not see are not counted.
- Hours per customer = outage customer-minutes ÷ 7,314 customers (ORNL modeled county customer count), including major storm days. It is comparable across counties but is not the SAIDI a utility files.
- An outage event is a continuous stretch with customers out; counts at 100, 1,000 and 10,000+ use its peak.
- Years loaded: 2015–2025. Sanders County has data for 2015–2025.
Cite this report
MassOutage (massoutage.com), Sanders County, MT annual power outage report, 2016, data as of Oct 3, 2026 02:41 UTC, sources: DOE EAGLE-I (https://eagle-i.doe.gov/); EAGLE-I modeled customer counts (MCC) (https://figshare.com/); EIA Form 861 (utility reliability) (https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/eia861/). https://massoutage.com/reports/2016/montana/sanders-county