Car wreck KOs power for thousands

WASILLA — A car wreck at the intersection of Vine and Hollywood roads briefly affected power to thousands of local residents in Big Lake and Meadow Lakes Wednesday morning, authorities said.

Several people called 911 at about 3:30 a.m., Thursday to report that a car had left the road and stuck an electrical structure near the intersection of Hollywood and Vine, according to trooper dispatches. Three people fled the scene of the wreck before troopers arrived.

Troopers identified Barbara Walter, 61, as a passenger in the car. Troopers say they located her following the crash at her nearby residence. She was transported to Mat-Su Regional Medical Center, and apparently, later released. Medical Center said Walter’s name was not found in their patient registry.

The incident caused about $3,000 worth of damage to an electrical structure there, and disrupted service to about 5,900 MEA customers in the Meadow Lakes area, according to MEA spokeswoman Julie Estey. The outage was reported shortly after 3:17 a.m., and power had been restored to all local customers by 5 a.m., she said.

“There was two transmission circuits on this one transmission structure,” Estey said. “The guy wire came in and flipped up when it was hit, and took down the top transmission circuit. To make repairs to that, we also had to de-energize the second transmission circuit.”

Power lines planned for construction through portions of Wasilla would have impacted the outage by allowing transmission system operators to send power to the impacted ratepayers along another route, Estey said.

Officials anticipate presenting a decisional document to the Wasilla planning commission for one of several alternate routes soon, she said.

“We probably still would have had an outage, but it likely would have been shorter,” she said.

Contact Brian O’Connor at 352-2269, brian.oconnor@frontiersman.com, or on Twitter @reporterbriano.