Lights and computer screens flickered last week, and then many carried on with their daily lives. But the brief brownout was a close call for a construction worker and it meant the loss of thousands of dollars in groceries for one local store.
General manager Jim Floyd gestured to the mostly-empty shelves in Hammer & Wikan Grocery’s freeze aisle. “Normally we try to keep pizza stocked because that’s the number one and number two, pizza and ice cream,” he said. “And you can see how light they are. Breakfast is pretty barren. We lost all the juice that was out here.”
The freezer went down July 12th during a brownout. And by the time the store realized it the next morning, food safety laws dictated that they had to throw all that food away. Floyd said it cost approximately $30,000.
The brownout happened when a fuse blew out on a power line along Mitkof Highway.
“We had a blink in the system,” said Karl Hagerman, Petersburg’s utility director. “And it was not normal. It was a fairly nice day.”
A utility crew went to check out the problem, thinking that maybe a bird had flown into the line. Instead they found a man with a burned arm. He was working on the roof of Rocky’s Marine with a contracting crew, and had touched a piece of metal flashing to the overhead power line.
“That fuse that blew definitely saved that man’s life,” said Hagerman, “and probably another employee that was right there with him on the roof at the time.”
That power line carries 14,000 volts. For comparison, your household electrical outlets carry 120 volts, and even that amount can kill a person. At Rocky’s Marine, burn marks on the roof and on the power line indicated that the current had grounded through the building, rather than through the man. Which Hagerman said was extremely lucky.
“Any time that a contact like that is made, there can be internal damage to somebody’s person that isn’t readily apparent at the time,” Hagerman said. “It can be hours later that internal organs start to fail, because they were damaged.”
The worker was medevaced to Harbor View Hospital in Seattle.
For most people in Petersburg, this life-threatening accident manifested as just a momentary flicker in their electricity. Appliances restarted, and the day went on. The small amount of power that your average, say, refrigerator or lamp draws came back without causing any problems, but Hammer and Wikan Grocery draws way more power than your average user. When that much current surged back all at once (instead of powering up gradually) it burned out a circuit board. And the store didn’t know it because their monitoring system was down.
“If that had been actually running, we could have worked with AML to bring freezers in for us and we would have pulled the product,” said General Manager Jim Floyd.
This week, things are back in order. The shelves at Hammer & Wikan are once again stocked with pizza and ice cream, and the store is planning to purchase a giant surge-protector. The worker who suffered the accident is with his family and is expected to recover fully. And Petersburg Municipal Power & Light is holding a joint safety training with the roofing contractor about the danger of working near high voltage lines.
