Alaska Co-ops Quickly Restore Power

Howling winds and dangerous waves that ravaged parts of Alaska’s western coast caused only minor problems for electric cooperatives serving the region, but dozens of villages reported damage.

National Weather Service meteorologists described the Nov. 9  Bering Sea storm as the strongest to hit the west coast of Alaska in 40 years. It was among the latest in a series of storms that have swept inland from the Bering Sea this fall, raking coastal communities and raising concerns about erosion.

“We deployed all of our traveling technicians in advance of the storm,” said Meera Kohler, president and CEO of Anchorage-based Alaska Village Electric Cooperative. Kohler received reports from technicians in the field as the storm moved ashore from the Bering Sea.

“In Teller, the water got to the steps of the power plant,” Kohler said. “Staff relocated to the airport at the end of the town where floodwaters hadn’t covered the road.”

A newly installed, but not yet energized, line connecting Teller with the village of Brevig Mission was damaged when a junction cabinet was swept away, and a submerged water crossing suffered damage to its anchoring system.

In the village of Akula Heights, a technician worked in darkness to locate the source of intermittent arcing. Once he found the problem along a span guy wire, he quickly completed a repair and there were no further problems.

At Mountain Village, technicians restored power to several consumers with damaged service entrances by early evening, said Kohler.

“The airport lost power for two days,” Kohler said. “Villagers used vehicles to light the airstrip so another technician could be flown in to help reset two broken poles on the airport line.”

Individual outages were also reported in other villages, including Savoonga, but the co-op was not able to move additional technicians to assist with restoration until airlines and charter plane operators resumed flights.

Forty homes were out of power in Tununak due to an in-line splice that actually broke in half, possibly as a result of being hit by airborne roof debris, Kohler said.

Kotzebue Electric Association reported no significant outages among its nearly 1,300 consumer-members. The Kotzebue-based co-op’s 17 wind turbines handled gusts in excess of 74 mph, but suffered no damage.

“The turbines are designed to self-protect when sustained winds top 50 mph, so they shut themselves down,” said Brad Reeve, general manager of the co-op.

“We had one brief outage on the system due to a break in a wire holding an insulator down,” Reeve said. “We had most of the feeder back on in five minutes and it took about an hour to repair an outage that affected about 20 homes.”