A damaged cable cut power to Moose Pass last weekend for almost 12 hours.
Chugach Electric Association spokeswoman Julie Hasquet says it took longer than expected to get the community’s roughly 180 customers back online. The association doesn’t have any linemen based in Moose Pass. She says they mostly live in Anchorage and the Matanuska-Susitna Valley, so it took a few hours for crews to arrive on scene.
“Keep in mind Moose Pass in December at eight o'clock at night – it's dark,” she said. “They're on snowmachines. They're on foot. So they're not just driving their trucks on a road, right? They are in some pretty challenging terrain, sectionalizing this line, looking for the problem.”
The outage started Saturday evening around 8 p.m. and ended Sunday morning around 6:30 a.m. Initially, crews thought a damaged section of power line near the Trail Lake Hatchery caused the outage. Because that area is prone to avalanches, the power lines are buried in the ground. That meant work for linemen.
“They literally have to dig into the ground, because it's underground, to try to figure out what the problem was,” she said.
Crews brought Moose Pass back online by going around the lines they suspected were damaged. Crews later determined the buried power lines weren’t to blame. It was a damaged, above-ground cable, called a guy line, that caused the outage.
On Tuesday, Moose Pass experienced another power outage. It impacted less customers than the weekend outage and was caused by an unraveled conductor. Chugach Electric cut power to the community for about two hours to make repairs. All Moose Pass customers were back online by 7 p.m.