Thousands of Kenai Peninsula residents lost power last weekend after high winds and stormy weather caused multiple outages around the borough.
Homer Electric Association reported 28 outages early Sunday morning, impacting 900 members. By the early afternoon, the number of customers without power had grown to 5,083.
Rob Montgomery is HEA’s chief operating officer. He says they got their first outage alert around 1 a.m. Sunday, and that Sterling, Funny River and Kasilof were the hardest-hit communities. A downed high voltage line in Sterling on top of smaller outages kept power out longer in that area.
“With any outage, you know, you're looking at your largest circuits,” he said. “And in the case of Sterling, this time, we had trees damage the high voltage power line that serves the Sterling area.”
The National Weather Service showed wind speeds near 30 miles per hour in Kenai and Soldotna on Sunday morning. Montgomery says those conditions spelled trouble for a familiar hazard.
“A lot of this goes back to a problem we've been dealing with for the last several years, and that's the hazard trees from the beetle kill that are outside of our right of way,” he said.
Spruce bark beetles have ravaged trees around the Kenai Peninsula in recent years. The beetles eat the fleshy material between the bark and core of trees, killing them. Dead trees are fire hazards and more prone to falling over than healthy trees. Montgomery says nearly all of the outages reported Sunday were caused by toppled trees.
When determining which outages to address first, he says HEA prioritizes scope.
“Typically what you're trying to do is get the larger lines, the larger circuits, back on first, because that way you get the largest number of members back on and and then you start working your way out,” he said.
HEA also brought in contract crews – those are linemen not affiliated with a specific company – to help get the power back on for customers. Montgomery says there were between eight and ten crews working around the clock at any given time to respond to outages.
Montgomery says customers should contact HEA if they notice a tree in close proximity to a power line to mitigate future outages,. As of Tuesday evening, HEA reported less than 100 customers were without power across the peninsula. Up-to-date outage information is available on the cooperative’s outage map.
