A crow caused a seven-minute electricity outage in Haines and Skagway Monday afternoon after running into power lines above the Bamboo Room.
Sonny Myers, the foreman of the Haines AP&T crew, said the bird had tangled itself up in distribution wires on Second Avenue and Dalton Street, knocking out power to Haines and Skagway.
“He got into the wrong place,” said Myers.
For some customers, the outage was the second bird-caused blackout in just over two weeks. On Aug. 19, a bald eagle carrying a fish collided with a power line near 1.5 Mile on Haines Highway, knocking out power for 140 Haines homes.
Although it only lasted about seven minutes, Monday’s outage was much more widespread. Russ Bell, an AP&T lineman apprentice who worked on restoring power after the outage, said that the bird happened to run into the wires at an unfortunate place, setting off a “triggered reaction” which caused power loss in both Haines and Skagway.
“Fortunately it was just minor things that failed,” Bell said, “not huge components that needed to be replaced.”
But the seven-minute outage required AP&T to switch to diesel power instead of the usual, cleaner hydroelectric plant near Skagway to power Haines and Skagway. The switch lasted for about three hours after the blackout.
“It’s a sensitive system,” Bell said.