High winds in Southcentral Alaska Sunday night and in the early hours of Monday morning knocked out power to more seven thousand households in Matanuska Electric Association’s coverage area.
MEA spokesperson Julie Estey says most of the damage was caused by fallen trees.
“These are pretty small, localized incidents. They were widespread throughout our service areas, but they were primarily smaller outages impacting a couple of hundred to a couple of thousand members each, caused just by trees in the lines and downed lines and damaged equipment.”
The outages were reported in Chugiak, Eagle River, and from Palmer to Willow. As of noon Monday, only 300 customers were without power.
“Most of those are in the Nancy Lake area. They are associated with the larger 1300 person outage. We were able to make repairs and close in the majority of that line but the crew is just patrolling that final segment to make sure there is no additional damage. So we anticipate that they will be restored shortly as well, and we still have ten additional people in the Butte, and a few scattered single member outages as well.”
Winds between 70 and 80 mph rocked Turnagain Arm and Anchorage’s Hillside area Sunday night. The National Weather Service reported gusts of up to 81 mph at one time during the night.