PUBLIC UTILITIES

An unplanned electrical outage on Monday left Unalaska without power for more than an hour and a half.

The city-wide outage was caused by a failed transfer switch on East Point Road around 1 p.m., according to the city's Public Utilities Director, Dan Winters.

"It took awhile to find out where the ground fault," he said. "Each component from the powerhouse to the ground fault needs to be tested."

The City of Unalaska has begun installing new utility readers at local homes.

The roughly $400,000 system upgrade will allow the Department of Public Utilities to monitor electricity consumption without visiting customers' houses.

The automatic meters will also improve the billing process, according to Public Utilities Director Dan Winters.

After dealing with a handful of electrical outages earlier this month, Unalaska's powerhouse is fully operational again.

That's according to the city's Public Utilities Director, Dan Winters. He fielded questions from Mayor Frank Kelty during Tuesday's brief City Council meeting.

"We're all good to go at the powerhouse? No more upcoming power outages?" Kelty asked of Winters. "He's giving me the thumbs-up."

Updated 6/13/19 at 3:40 p.m.  

The City of Unalaska is still trying to fix damaged powerhouse equipment that's prompted about five outages in the last week and a half.

Public Utilities Director Dan Winters said the city flew in an engineer on Tuesday to examine a viper control switch, which has run aground for unknown reasons.

Unalaska's power is back on after two island-wide outages in the last two days.

The city's Department of Public Utilities has rerouted electricity around a damaged control switch at the powerhouse. That switch spurred the first, unscheduled outage Tuesday around 7 p.m.

"Everything tripped offline, meaning the generators and all the field breakers in the powerhouse opened up," said Utilities Director Dan Winters. "We found out one of our viper control switches was bad, and it blew a potential transformer."