Power was out in Sitka's island neighborhoods from Wednesday evening until Thursday afternoon, after the failure of a 3,000-foot underwater cable. City crews replaced the cable and officials continue to investigate the cause of the outage. (Photo: Ed Ronco)
Sitka | The city restored power this afternoon to residents in Sitka’s island neighborhoods after an outage that began when an underwater cable failed on Wednesday evening.
Utility director Christopher Brewton said customers on the islands lost power Wednesday evening around 8:20 p.m.
The undersea cable that failed runs from a switch beneath O’Connell Bridge to Aleutski Island. He says officials sent a diver down to inspect the cable, but that the diver was unable to find anything out. There are a few possibilities.
“It could have been a defect in the cable that took this long to show up, it could have been movement across the bottom,” Brewton said. “It could have been caused by a vessel anchoring nearby and snagging the vessel; any number of issues.”
Brewton said they tried to determine if any vessels were anchored in the area, but came up with no definite proof that anything was anchored. The cable is marked on nautical charts.
Underwater cable is more expensive than what hangs from poles on land. Brewton says the city has a budget for emergencies, and that the repairs will probably fall within that budget, but he didn’t immediately have an exact dollar amount.
The city had backup cable on hand, Brewton said, and laid about 3,000 feet of it into the water Thursday afternoon. The cable was energized shortly afterward.
