An electrical power surge during the Chilkat Valley’s recent, heavy snowstorm caused damage to homes along Lutak Road. While Alaska Power and Telephone is encouraging residents to fill out an incident form if they experienced damage as a result, a spokesperson said the company rarely compensates homeowners in this type of situation.
The trouble started on Oct. 18 with an areawide outage. According to AP&T data, it occurred at 1:43 p.m. and lasted for less than half an hour. It affected all 2,900 of the company’s customers in Haines and Skagway. Operations manager Darren Belisle said the snowstorm caused trees to touch the power lines, which caused an outage.
“Every once in a while, surges happen because of a power outage,” he said.
The company did not have to repair lines or even remove trees that Belisle said essentially bounced on the lines while heavily laden with snow.
“The snow releases and they go back away again,” he said.
But some homeowners were left with damage.
“Ours was limited to blown fuses, two fried on-demand water heaters, and our dishwasher is toast,” wrote Barbara Nettleton in an email.
She said she stopped into AP&T and got their form, but couldn’t hold off on some repairs. Nettleton wrote that they have already purchased a new heater “because we literally had no hot water.”
Nettleton said the family has three buildings and is fortunate that the damage was limited.
“It is apparent that everything on a power strip was saved and anything plugged directly into the wall is toast,” she wrote.
Mandy Reigle, who lives on Lutak Road, shared a photo of damage to her electric meter. She said her boiler got fried and cost about $700 to fix.
She is hoping to get some of that cost covered, but Reigle said AP&T hadn’t agreed to pay for any of the damages yet, just shared an incident form to complete.
Belisle said the company recommends that people contact their own homeowner’s insurance carrier to see if repair costs can be covered because the company puts a lot of work into preventing damages, it rarely pays for damages on the customer’s side of the meter.
But, AP&T will use the forms as a starting point for an investigation into how well a person’s home is grounded and advise them on how it could be safer.
Belisle said customers need to make sure their homes are well-grounded.
“The customer’s responsibility is their home protection,” he said.
He pointed to the company’s operating tariff, which is on file with the Regulatory Commission of Alaska. It lays out the company’s police on where its responsibility for damage ends. According to that tariff, the “company will not be held liable for an injury, loss, causality or damage … on the customer’s premises except injuries or damages resulting from the negligence of the company.”
“None of this is due to negligence on our part – Mother Nature caused this,” Belisle said.
While AP&T customers can complain to the regulatory commission, it explicitly does not regulate damage claims.
What people can do – especially those who have recently purchased their homes and may not know how well their meter box is grounded – is call AP&T for a grounding inspection at their meter base.
“We’ll be happy to come out and check,” Belisle said. “We can’t, by law, do the fix. All we would do is check it for them.”
If everything is properly grounded, Belisle said the building is protected because any electrical surges will follow a safe path to the ground instead of into circuits and devices where it could cause damage.
“And a lot of people think they’re grounded properly but, they’re not. Generally you have to put more ground rods in for protection,” he said. “We try to do things to help minimize [surges] with our own grounding and surge protection. But, electricity is a funny beast.”