Many residents across Wrangell, Petersburg and Ketchikan had their morning disrupted by a power outage on October 19th just after 9 a.m. The outage came as a surprise shortly before a planned shutoff to allow for upgrades to the power plant’s 45-year-old system.
In Wrangell, crews had backup diesel generators prepped for transfer and power was restored within an hour. It was followed by several more outages over the next 24 hours.
David McHolland is the superintendent of Wrangell Municipal Light and Power. He says the initial outage was caused by work the Southeast Alaska Power Agency is doing at its Tyee Lake hydroelectric power plant.
They’re trying to get ready for the third turbine to be installed and one of the contractors screwed a bolt in and they shorted out the 480-volt service It blacked out Tyee, and in turn, it blacked out Wrangell and Petersburg.
Wrangell experienced four power outages within the two days, according to McHolland. The systemwide outage last Monday morning; a localized outage when trees fell on a line at around 5.5-Mile Zimovia Highway; then communication errors led to another outage when transferring back to hydropower that same day; and finally issues at Ketchikan’s Swan Lake hydropower project that led to a partial system shutdown last Tuesday morning.
An email statement from SEAPA CEO Robert Siedman [Seed-man] confirmed that the initial outage and later Swan Lake outage resulted from contracted work preparing for the new turbine installation. But he says that the subsequent outages were unrelated to their Tyee facility.
This is the second round of issues this month, following brownouts on the morning of Oct. 1, when Wrangell switched to generators for a planned Tyee shutdown.
McHolland says his team is working to prevent any future power loss.
A lot of these outages were due to maintenance we’ve been trying to do and get things caught up to make it more reliable. So, as long as we don’t have a bunch of trees and stuff on the line, we shouldn’t have any outages, but I’m sure there will be at some point.
On the Tyee side, Siedman said in his statement that they understand that any outages create inconveniences for their customers and that SEAPA is working to minimize construction impacts.
