City goes dark during brief power outage

The City of Wrangell was thrown into darkness for about forty-five minutes the evening of Nov. 6. At about 4:45 p.m., power to the city went out. Several buildings were able to keep their lights on thanks to backup generators, but most of the city went dark.

Light was restored less than an hour later. Streetlights came on first, followed by power to buildings around Front

Street and then up the hill through the rest of town. For the most part, city residents took the power outage in stride. People on the street could be heard commenting on how well the stars could be seen in the sky, and on social media several people were joking about whether they had forgotten to pay their electric bill.

Mark Armstrong, with Wrangell Municipal Light & Power, said that the power outage was due to some of the city's generators shutting off. This caused the rest of the generators, which were still operating, to shut down automatically to avoid breaking from putting too much demand on them. He said that they had been upgrading control panels to the generators, and the shutdown was caused by a minor complication during the process.

"We've been doing some upgrades to our generators," he said. "Basically what happened is the generators lost power. As they shut down, there was more demand than there was supply."

Armstrong added that the issue that caused the blackout was identified and corrected. Upgrades to the generators' control panels were completed on the morning of Fri., Nov. 7.

 

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