Power outages are popping up across the peninsula this morning following heavy overnight snowfall.
According to a post from the Homer Electric Facebook page, there were 3,700 HEA members without power as of 5:30am. There are several outages spread across the northern part of HEA’s service territory from Nikiski to Kenai to K-Beach/Funny River to Sterling.
Currently, the largest impacted area is in Sterling.
HEA has multiple crews in the field attempting to clear heavy snow loads on power lines and leaning trees contacting power lines.
The first update on outages came at 5:10am when HEA posted: “Well, winter is officially here. We have 1,929 members without power this morning. We have crews in the field working as quickly and as safely as they can in this snow.”
According to Jennifer Rosin with Homer Electric, more line crews are on the way to support HEA staff in restoring power to the more than 50 outages across the peninsula.
“We have crews that have been in the field through the night working. We’ll have more crews coming in here shortly,” Rosin said in a call to KSRM this morning. “The outages are being caused from this really dense, heavy snow. And so it looks like what’s happening is trees are leaning into the line or the lines are snow shedding, which causes them to slap together and then causes the outage.”
For real time outage information please visit HEA’s outage map > outage.homerelectric.com