Truck vs. power pole crash causes widespread power outage

WASILLA — A pick-up truck struck a power pole Wednesday night in Wasilla, causing around 25,000 Matanuska Electric Association members to lose power.

"A truck ran into one of our transmission line poles located along Bogard Road, south of Seldon," MEA spokeswoman Julie Estey wrote in a Wednesday night email. "Because this is the main transmission line that feeds Wasilla, Big Lake and KGB, approximately 25,000 members were initially impacted. We were able to reroute power from other locations to serve the majority of our members and by 11:15 p.m. power was restored to all members except the 853 accounts served by the distribution feeder attached to the transmission pole."

Estey said it took about six hours to repair the damaged pole. After the pole was fixed, it then took crews several more hours to deal with other outages related to the incident.

"The line crew has been out there all night trying to find the damaged section of line or piece of equipment. So 1,000 members that were a part of the initial outage are still without power," Estey wrote at around 8 a.m. Thursday. "MEA crews will continue to attack the problem until it is solved. We hope to have all power restored within the next hour or two. We know this has been a long outage for our members in that area and we doing everything we can to get the lights back on and freezers humming."

By 10 a.m. Thursday, Estey said power had been restored to all MEA customers.

According to Alaska State Troopers, a 30-year-old Wasilla man was driving the vehicle that struck the pole at around 9:55 p.m. Wednesday. In an online dispatch, troopers wrote that Andrew J. Remiorz was driving west on Bogard Road near Tait Road when his 2011 Nissan Titan left the road and collided with the utility pole. Remiorz was taken to Mat-Su Regional Medical Center with unspecified injuries. As of Thursday morning he had not been charged with any crimes, and troopers said their investigation was still underway.

A picture shared on the cooperative's Facebook and Twitter feeds showed a red pick-up truck with damage to its front end resting next to a downed power pole. The coop said the damaged pole initially caused six substations to go down.

Estey said a separate crash involving a vehicle and a private light pole in the Settlers Bay area did not affect service.

The outage was first reported at around 10 p.m. on the cooperative's Facebook page. Efforts to inform the public about the outage were initially hampered somewhat after the cooperative's website crashed due to a large volume of traffic, according to posts by MEA on its social media accounts.

The cause of the crash was not immediately known.

The cooperative said it would continue to post updates for customers on Facebook and Twitter.