At 12:27 P.M. on Saturday, power went out in parts of Petersburg. Three minutes later, downtown Wrangell was also left in the dark, leaving Petersburg and Wrangell officials to think that the two incidents were related.
"The issues in both communities seem too close together to be considered a coincidence, but no one has been able to explain why the cutout failure in Petersburg caused a feeder in Wrangell to drop out," said Petersburg Utility Director Karl Hagerman in a statement to the Sentinel.
The outage in Petersburg was a result of an insulator failure near Rocky's Marine on Mitkof Highway, said Hagerman. The porcelain insulators tend to crack over time and are prone to fail without notice, he said. The failed insulator caused a short, which led to a breaker to open up. The feeder, or power line, that follows Mitkof Highway north to the downtown area lost power, as a result.
By 1:25 P.M., Petersburg Power and Light had restored power to the affected areas, said Hagerman.
Meanwhile in Wrangell, shortly after the insulator failed in Petersburg, feeder one went offline, said Rod Rhoades, light and power director for Wrangell. He said the outage in Petersburg may have led to a frequency spike that would have traveled through the Southeast Alaska Power Agency line; however, a frequency spike was not detected on the system, leaving the source of the outage unknown.
"It happened in such close proximity to the event in Petersburg that we think they're related, but there's no smoking gun," said Rhoades.
Power was restored to downtown Wrangell at 12:50 P.M., 20 minutes after feeder one lost power, but at 12:57 P.M., a small single phase transformer blew out, causing a second power outage for those who receive their power from feeder one, said Rhoades. Power was restored a second time to the downtown area of Wrangell at about 2 P.M.
SEAPA is currently investigating the cause of the initial power outage in Wrangell.
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