Anchorage blown away by extreme weather

On the edge of what other city in North America can you get knocked flat by hurricane-force winds in a blizzard roaring up the suburban neighborhood street you've boldly started down in an effort to find out what caused the power outage?

And where else in the country would they knock on the door of a neighbor to tell him the high-voltage lines carrying power across the valley have been torn completely off the pole next to his house, leading him to look at you and ask, "You'll do anything for a cheap thrill, won't you?'' And then laugh as another gust hit, and his house shook, and the adjacent power line whipped around like it was going to crack?

But then Brian Roberts had been through this a few times before.

He noted that only a week earlier, the hurricane-force winds that rolled across the Anchorage Hillside tore a separate insulator loose from the same power pole and left the line bouncing and swaying in the wind. Chugach Electric Association (CEA) came out to fix it a few days later, he said. It was a different line from the one that tore an insulator out of the cross bar this time. That line then hit another, caused a whole lot of sparks, and kicked out a breaker.

Neighbor Richard Murphy got a spectacular light show. Shortly after the power went out, he called by cell phone from the only corner of his house that has decent cell coverage to offer a situation report. Daughter Katie was by then sitting at the dining room table studying for her GRE, a requirement for admittance to some post-graduate universities, by the light of a headlamp. It was time to fire up the trusty, old Coleman lantern.

Everyone in Anchorage should own a Coleman lantern or some equivalent, as this is a city vulnerable to power outages either by wind or earthquake.

Rogers and his girlfriend had candles lit when I dropped in. On up the hill, Murphy had an old-fashioned kerosene lantern burning. We sat in his kitchen enjoying it's glow for a while, sipping a nice Pinot Noir, enjoying some crackers and cheese, and feeling the whole house shake in the big gusts. It would go on like that for hours.

Afterward, everyone would compare notes on the power of the wind. This is something of a neighborhood sport. A week earlier, Tim Kelley had registered 105 mph on his anemometer. He reported another neighbor closer to the Potter Creek ravine had 107 mph. My wind gauge said 100 mph. The semi-official report from the National Weather Service, recorded at yet another home in the neighborhood, was 97 mph.

When I met neighbor Mark Shasby, the interim director of Alaska Climate Science Center, out hiking on a neighborhood trail, he wondered if the big blows might be linked to the warming off the ocean. Storms generate significantly more energy over warm water than cold.