TelAlaska's Jan Newkirk waited out the service interruption in the company's office on East Broadway. (Annie Ropeik/KUCB)

A blown transformer took down the city’s entire power grid for a short time on Friday, disrupting landline phone service and even 911.

The problem apparently started during a transformer installation on East Point Road. A contractor was hooking up service to the Pacific Stevedoring warehouse, which is being remodeled after a fire last summer.

The city had provided a transformer to convert mainline power into a voltage the warehouse could use. Public utilities director Dan Winters says Aleutian Electrical Contractors was responsible for the installation.

"They do the electrical work," he says, "and then they call us up and say, 'We’re ready for you to turn the electricity on to us.'"

But Winters says the contractor had two of the transformer’s three electrical phases switched.

"We turn it on, it goes to the cross-phased -- boom," he says. "And [it] ruined the transformer."

The shock caused the whole grid to go down on Amaknak and Unalaska Islands, just before noon on Friday.

Winters says a newly-installed relay control system helped the power come back on much faster than in the past -- in about five minutes.

But the shock also blew out the fuses that power TelAlaska’s Internet and landline phone services, including 911. And those didn’t come back on so easily.

Public safety director Jamie Sunderland says he can't remember ever losing emergency phone service along with power in the past. 

But "it is actually connected to a real phone number -- a seven-digit phone number like most folks would have," he says, which could explain why the service went down. 

The lines stayed that way for more than an hour. Technicians for TelAlaska manually restored the system from a control room behind the Unalaska community center.

Public safety dispatcher Peter Gurney says they received no complaints about missed emergency calls during the outage. 

As for the transformer -- Dan Winters says any user who damages city equipment is responsible for covering the cost. The blown transformer is likely destroyed. It was brand new, according to Winters, and cost about $18,000. But he says they did have a spare on hand to replace it.

Reached Friday afternoon, Pacific Stevedoring CEO Andrew Murphy said he wasn’t aware that electrical work at their warehouse had caused the outage. Calls to the company's general contractor, Industrial Resources, Inc., and their subcontractor, Aleutian Electrical, weren’t returned by press time. 

KUCB's Lauren Rosenthal contributed to this report.