Lutak residents fired up woodstoves, melted snow and hunkered down Saturday when a hard-to-reach break in a main transmission line left their neighborhood without power for nearly 24 hours.

“It was the longest power outage I’ve experienced here for at least 10 years,” said Lutak Road resident Al Badgley.

The main outage occurred at 2:40 p.m. Saturday when a tree fell on a transmission line on the Ripinsky hillside, said Darren Belisle, manager of power operations of Alaska Power & Telephone.

AP&T was able to electrify most of the Haines grid after about 15 minutes by turning on diesel generators at its Second Avenue power plant, but the break between town and Lutak was more problematic, as it required rebuilding sections of line in steep terrain away from a road, Belisle said. “Our crews worked quite a long time on that.”

Wet, heavy snow and winds wreaked havoc on service through Saturday evening, touching wet trees to power lines and power lines to each other, causing localized outages between 10 Mile Haines Highway and town and on Piedad’s Anway Road, Belisle said.

At Lutak, Badgley and neighbors John and Suzanne Newton were able to stay warm using woodstoves for heat and to melt snow to make water. Brad Adams, manager of Lynnview Lodge, wasn’t as lucky. Adams said the temperature in the 3,000-square-foot lodge dipped to the fifties.

“It was a beast,” Adams said. “The lodge kept warm for about 10 hours without an issue. It started dropping drastically after that.”

Fortunately, the lodge had no guests. “We’d have had to refund their money. People can take a few hours in the dark but what they can’t do is no water,” Adams said. He said he’d be looking at increasing water storage as well as buying larger, linkable generators in the future.

The Badgleys and Newtons, whose wells rely on electric pumps, used melted snow to make water to flush toilets.

“Luckily my Kindle was totally charged,” Suzanne Newton said. “I had a forced reading marathon, which was super. I try to do a lot of reading on the weekends, but I get distracted. That wasn’t a problem. And it was a nice thing that town still had power, so we could go in for coffee.”

The Newtons moved about 10 years ago from central Ohio, where outages due to ice storms are common. “We were used to (outages) but not so used to them here.”

Badgley, who has hosted a safety talk on the public radio station for 20 years, said the outage was a good example of the need to be prepared. He admitted he had to “scramble around” to find batteries for flashlights and said he had about 15 candles lit in the home, adding that they were in secure holders.

“The key is flashlights. You have to think, ‘What is it I have to do to make it through the day?’ It’s not a bad idea to get a little bit prepared,” Badgley said.

The net effect of the outage was that his ice cream got a little soft. He said a full freezer typically can stay cold about two days “without losing anything.” On Monday, Newton said she was doing an experiment to see if thawed popsicles in her freezer would refreeze.

“Frequently our stuff unfreezes on the barge anyway,” Newton said.

The Haines power grid was disconnected from Skagway’s Goat Lake hydro source for nearly a full day as crews responded to problems, Belisle said. Skagway also operated its diesel plant during the storm, he said.

Winds reached 60 mph in Skagway, Belisle said. In those kinds of winds, “Birch trees can bend right over.”

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