About 400 customers in East Anchorage are still without power, according to Municipal Light and Power spokesperson Ronnie Dent. Dent said Friday morning that additional residences without electricity were located late Thursday evening, many of them in apartments. Dent said ML&P crews have been working 24-7 since the power failure started about 10:20 Tuesday night.
She said power was being generated during the entire time, but it was the transmission system that was compromised, due to so many trees hitting lines. ML&P has three transmission circuits that feed into distribution lines, but after the first one went down, the others followed suit within 20 minutes Tuesday.
Dent says the power company’s goal is to get all customers back on by Saturday morning. She urges customers without power by then to call ML&P’s power outage line, or if people see downed lines, call ML&P ‘s downed line at once.
Other power companies are not as close to restoring full service.
“Last night our crews worked through the night and we restored service to approximately 600 members last night. However, we still have approximately 2,000 that are without power. We have a total of 26 crews out in the field today. That is probably triple the amount of a normal crew that we would have out there,” Chugach Electric Association communications coordinator Sarah Wiggers said.
Wiggers says some customers may be without power for a couple of more days
“We’re still striving to have all the outages restored by this evening, though there will be some isolated outages that may carry over into the week yet,” Wiggers said.
Chugach Electric serves more than 81,000 service locations in Anchorage.
“And at the peak of the storm, we had 25,000 service locations out,” Wiggers said.
Most of those locations still without service are in the city’s south and west sides. Wiggers urges Chugach customers without service to call the company’s power outage number, 762-7888.
ML&P’s power outage number 269-7671.
APTI Reporter-Producer Ellen Lockyer started her radio career in the late 1980s, after a stint at bush Alaska weekly newspapers, the Copper Valley Views and the Cordova Times. When the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Prince William Sound, Valdez Public Radio station KCHU needed a reporter, and Ellen picked up the microphone.
Since then, she has literally traveled the length of the state, from Attu to Eagle and from Barrow to Juneau, covering Alaska stories on the ground for the AK show, Alaska News Nightly, the Alaska Morning News and for Anchorage public radio station, KSKA
elockyer (at) alaskapublic (dot) org | 907.550.8446 | About Ellen
