Traffic accident, blown fuse cause Chugach outages

A pair of outages left more than 4,000 Chugach customers without power Tuesday, July 31.

Nearly 2,000 Chugach Electric customers lost power at 10:59 a.m. after a traffic accident. A vehicle went off the road and knocked a switch cabinet off its concrete pad at the northwest corner of Arctic and Dimond boulevards. Chugach responded by rerouting power to most of the homes and businesses in the area within 40 minutes. The strip mall housing Gallo's Mexican Restaurant and other businesses were without power until Chugach crews replaced the switch cabinet and re-energized power to them at 5:27 p.m. Switch cabinets are connection points for underground power lines.

An unrelated outage at 10:50 a.m. the same day left nearly 2,400 Southeast Anchorage customers without power. The outage started when a fault caused a transformer fuse to blow at a pole near 64th Avenue. That, in turn, tripped a breaker in Chugach's Dowling Substation, resulting in an outage for customers along Abbott Loop Road from Dowling Road to 72nd Avenue. Power was restored at 11:26 a.m. for all but 16 customers who were out until a Chugach crew refused the transformer shortly after 2 p.m.

Chugach is the largest electric utility in Alaska, providing power for Alaskans throughout the Railbelt through retail, wholesale and economy energy sales.