Yesterday’s power outage affected 5,000 customers

AEL&P headquarters in Lemon Creek.  (Photo by Casey Kelly/KTOO)
AEL&P headquarters in Lemon Creek. (Photo by Casey Kelly/KTOO)

Monday’s power outage in Juneau affected about 5,000 Alaska Electric Light and Power customers.

Electricity was out in parts of the Mendenhall Valley, Auke Bay and out the road, as well as some areas of Douglas and downtown.

AELP spokeswoman Debbie Driscoll says about a third of the company’s customers lost power.

She says a crew doing some work on the Lake Dorothy transmission line apparently caused a power fluctuation, and a protective relay sensed it “and it caused what we call our LD1 breaker, that basically a big circuit breaker, to open on that line. That action initiated what we call a load-shed sequence, which opened up 16 feeders down the line. That’s about half of our feeders.”

Power was restored in a little more than an hour.

She says telephone lines to AELP were jammed when the power went off. about 8:20 a.m.  Driscoll says the company immediately posts information about outages to its Facebook and Twitter sites, and you don’t have to be a social media expert to get the information.

“That is absolutely the best place for customers to find information is on our Facebook and Twitter page. And they don’t have to use Facebook or Twitter. They just have to be able to access our website and click on one of those icons and it takes you right to that page,” she says.

 

 

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