A weekend power outage affected 1,600 people in Park City this past weekend. While many were concerned about homes and businesses the outage also affected local parking.
This weekend as power went out the arms on the China Bridge garage went up. Johnny Wasden with Park City Parking explains why.
“They’re designed to basically go up so that no one gets trapped in there. Not requiring payment or anything like that just because it’s no one’s fault. We just want to be able to get people out of there in the event of a power failure.”
While the exit arms go up when power goes out so do the entrance. Meaning some people might drive into the garage and not be issued a ticket, when power comes back on exiting requires patrons to call and explain their situation. Wasden says the city prepares for this.
“We have a third contracted party that fields those calls the park on-calls. We inform them that we have a power outage and that there are going to be people that are going to be calling in and saying, ‘I didn’t get a ticket on my entry’. They basically just send them out, open the gates assuming the power has been restored at that point.”
Wasden says the park on-call representatives should be available 24/7 but if you’re unable to reach them you should contact Park City Parking Department during business hours, or the Park City Police after hours.
Wasden also says that the outage did not affect the street parking units.
“Those ones are solar powered. They’re independently powered so each of them have their own little battery unit in there as a back-up. They’re not connected to any kind of grid so they were not affected by the power outage it was just China Bridge unfortunately.”
