On Thursday, Aug. 31, all the lights in Haines and Skagway went out in the middle of the day during a power outage. Haines gets its hydropower from Skagway via an undersea cable, and the power outage was caused by complications in north Skagway.
“We had a contractor run a vehicle into where the main transmission comes from underground and moves to a conduit up along a pole,” said Alaska Power & Telephone operations manager Darren Belisle. The wires broke and a fire ensued. Thankfully, no one was injured. A crew hailing from both Skagway and Haines was dispatched to put out the fire and assess the damage.
Belisle said that the incident knocked out power in both towns, but the crew was able to restore power for all but two customers within 25 minutes of the outage. The towns transitioned to their diesel backup while the transmission lines were being fixed.
Borough manager Annette Kreitzer said that they did not lose internal network, internet access or essential services, but staff did stop working for around 20-30 minutes while they shut down their computers.
“This is done because we never know how long a power outage will last and it’s safer to preemptively power down our user devices rather than risk our battery backups failing due to an extended power outage,” Kreitzer wrote in an email to the CVN.
The library had a battery backup fail during the outage. Staff internet was restored by 5 p.m. Thursday but public internet and Wi-Fi were not restored until Friday morning.
“The plan is to replace the uninterruptible power supply unit in the library to ensure this doesn’t happen again. We have funds in the FY24 capital budget for a generator to serve both the library and the Borough Administrative office and are in the throes of working with a contractor on that project,” wrote Kreitzer.