Saturday’s electrical power outage in Wrangell and Petersburg was caused by a contractor training employees at the Tyee Lake hydroelectric plant.
The Southeast Alaska Power Agency owns and operates that power plant and sells electricity to the two communities. SEAPA CEO Trey Acteson writes in an email that the contractor entered an incorrect input to the plant’s control system during an employee training session. That system has recently been updated and the training was associated with those upgrades.
He apologized for the outage and writes that the upgrades will improve the reliability of the power plant’s controls in the future.
The outage lasted a little over an hour, starting around 9:15 and ending around 10:25 Saturday morning.
