Heavy snow blamed for power outages

PALMER — If the electric company’s speculation turns out to be correct, it seems the effects of last week’s winter storm were still being felt even after the snow had tapered off.

“We had a major outage this weekend and it was about 15,000 people. It happened Saturday morning just before 8 a.m.,” said Matanuska Electric Association spokeswoman Lorali Carter.

The outage stretched over a good portion of the utility’s coverage area, with eight substations going down from Eklutna through the core Valley area.

She said the utility was able to restore power relatively quickly to about half of those customers, turning the lights back on within 30 minutes. For the rest, it was about two and a half hours of darkness.

The snowstorm dumped more than a foot of snow on the Valley over the course of last week. It led to traffic snarls and other general unpleasantness but had mostly tapered off by then and life had returned to normal.

Except that the snow was still there. When snow builds up on power lines, in what the utility refers to as “snow loading,” oftentimes the snow will fall off of one line, sending it snapping back up to hit another.

That is what MEA thinks most likely happened Saturday.

“Our speculation is that snow loading caused the lines to slap together, but we really don’t know. We couldn’t find any major evidence, damage or anything like that,” Carter said.

A second outage came a day later when 800 or so customers in the Knik-Goose Bay Road and Fairview Loop areas had their lights go out Sunday from about 5:20 a.m. to 9:30 a.m.

That outage wasn’t caused by snow loading though, unless trees can be said to also experience the phenomenon.

“That was from trees bending into the line or actually finally snapping and falling into the line,” Carter said.

Besides those two outages, there were numerous other smaller outages, due mostly to wind and snow and just generally poor winter weather, she said.

“We had scattered outages throughout the weekend, too many to really report on,” Carter said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.