Heavy and severe thunderstorms moved through the central Kenai Peninsula early Thursday morning, bringing with it lightning strikes that knocked out power to over 13,700 Homer Electric Association members in the K-Beach, Kenai, Soldotna, Kasilof, Ninilchik, Anchor Point, and Homer areas. The storms knocked out the Billy Thompson and Kasilof substations on the 115 Line as crews spent all Thursday morning working to restore power as soon as they possibly could.
Tanya Lautaret, Public Relations and State Affairs Strategist for Homer Electric Association tells KSRM that the outages can be blamed on the severe storms:
“So the crews did patrol the lines and all the members that were affected by the possible lightning strikes this morning that took the line out between south Soldotna and Anchor Point, they’ve patrolled the line. They did not find damage. That’s when we were able to restore all the members from this early morning outage, but the ones from this morning, the crews did patrol the line, they did not find any damage. If the lightning strikes the line, then it will tap the circuits out and then once they’re able to patrol it and they discover that there’s no damage then they can safely bring the line back online.”
The National Weather Service in Anchorage tells KSRM:
“We have these thins called Eastly Waves. Basically, normally here in Alaska weather goes from west to east, but an eastly wave reverses the flow and it goes the other direction. What had happened was we had one of these troughs that basically rolled over the area from east to west and when it was picking up the moisture going through, and it bangs up against the mountains and you get a little bit of a turn in the atmosphere, a little bit of extra energy forms up, we get the bigger clouds and the chances for rain and thunder.”
HEA crews will continue to assess the situation, but state that the customers affected by the widespread power outages Thursday morning should see their power restored. If you are, however, still without power, contact HEA.