5:20 A.M. – 1/3/2022 UPDATE – Homer Electric Association crews continue to battle the power outages as a result of the high winds from this weekend. Even though crews did make significant progress on Sunday, a few hundred members still are experiencing outages across the Kenai Peninsula. HEA says that they are aware that some members still are without power and are working hard to restore that power as soon as possible.
3:30 P.M. – 1/2/2022 UPDATE – Homer Electric Association crews continue to make progress in some areas of the Kenai Peninsula and have reduced some of the outages.
They have been authorized to fly the lines this morning. After assessing the overnight damage, crews will have a better idea concerninig new trees that hit the line. With the winds diminishing, HEA is hoping that the lineman can restore power to most of the members on the north end of the system today.
Some of the crews have been sent home after working 24 hours straight in very cold weather, according to a social media post. In the meantime, four new crews have been dispatched and more will arrive shortly.
Repairs continue on the downed power lines as a result of the high wind gusts that were predicted from the National Weather Service in Anchorage.
HEA advises their members to be patient as they work to restore power as quickly as they can.
ORIGINAL – Homer Electric Association is reporting several thousand members affected by power outages on Saturday, January 1st. The winds started picking up around midday, which triggered many of the power outages across the Kenai Peninsula. As the afternoon carried on, the power outages continued to increase.
Keriann Baker with HEA:
“We’re having trees falling into the line kind of all over the place. it started slow and they got pretty quick fast. What we’ve done to kind of alleviate the situation is we’ve called in three separate crews, and they are just systematically going through the existing outages and then confirming and checking outages as they come up.”
The problem with the forecast is that winds are expected to increase overnight:
“We’d anticipate with this kind of high wind that we’re going to see over the next 24 hours that this situation is going to ebb and flow. As we fix one outage, we anticipate wind will cause others.”
The National Weather Service in Anchorage is forecasting winds from the north to blow between 25-30 mph, with gusts as high as 45 mph.
Click here for the HEA outage map.