SITKA, ALASKA On Oct. 12, just before 2:30 p.m., part of a tree broke loose in high winds and landed on top of the sole electrical line between the Blue Lake dam – where the Sitka makes most of its electricity – and the rest of town.
The line snapped, along with a massive wooden pole holding it up. And down below, in Sitka, the lights went out. Power was restored to the center of town in a matter of hours. But for those living outside the city center the outage began three days of rolling blackouts – alternating hours with electricity.
Some of the costs associated with the outage are easy to calculate, like the amount of diesel fuel burned: $115,000 worth. Labor on the response: $52,000. Equipment rental, materials, lube oil for the diesel generators … all direct costs to the city from the Oct. 12 outage. In total? Just over $186,000.
But the city also estimated the cost to others. Customers with diesel generators attached to their buildings – including the Pioneer’s Home and SEARHC – were asked to run those generators. The city estimates $22,000 among all of them. Another $24,000 in lost electric sales, and an estimated $150,000 in sales that businesses couldn’t make because they had to close down during the blackouts.
The city’s total estimate for a three-day outage: $400,000. (Download a PDF of the full report.)
The report also details some near disasters: irons and stoves that sprang back to life after their owners forgot to turn them off when the blackout rolled in their direction. Sewage pumps that came close to overflowing. And even issues with home health-care patients.
“There are some folks that have equipment that runs off commercial power that produces – typically it’s oxygen,” said Brewton, Sitka’s utility director. “So they essentially have their own oxygen generators at home – they don’t have to keep tanks stored and all that ordeal. As it turns out, they usually only have about an hour or so of tank storage for oxygen. So if the machine is unable to run, then very quickly you get into a serious situation.”
According to the report, future outages might require evacuation of those patients to a hospital with constant power. The rolling blackouts happened, Brewton says, because Sitka’s emergency diesel generators can’t produce enough power to meet the entire community’s demand. Once upon a time, they could, but when fuel prices went up, lots of people switched to electric heat, which upped the demand on the system. Plus, he says, our lives are just different now.
“We’ve gone from a one car, one TV household to 12 TVs, four computers, and a couple Wiis lying around the place,” he said. “The normal growth of things increase our load as well.”
The city is planning an expansion of the Blue Lake hydro project, but that will take years. So expanding the city’s emergency diesel capacity will be the most immediate fix to come out of the October outage.
“With the $100 million Blue Lake expansion we don’t really have a lot of extra money lying about for diesel. So it’s going to be a challenge to come up with a funding mechanism to pay for that. But it’s critical that we have it. To my knowledge, we’re probably one of the few if not the only community in Southeast that doesn’t have 100 percent backup diesel.”
The longer term solution is a redundant power line between Blue Lake and the rest of town. One was planned for the upland side of Sawmill Creek Road, where the state Department of Transportation was removing rock for a road expansion project. But those plans changed, Brewton said.
“Because they changed their project, they’re not going to be removing as much rock, that makes it a little bit difficult for us to build it.”
The city is looking at other fixes, too, according to the report, including improved communication and more rigorous maintenance along the main line.
There are some bright spots in the report. The weather after the storm passed was decent enough to allow crews to do their work in the remote Thimbleberry-Hart Lake trail area. It also commends city staff for long days worked during the outage.
Still, Brewton says Sitka got lucky. If the outage had happened during harsher weather, say in the middle of winter with heavy snowfall on the ground, things could have been much, much worse.
© Copyright 1970, Raven Radio Foundation Inc.
