Unalaska, AK – Unalaska experienced an hours-long, community-wide power outage Wednesday. It started at about 11:20 am. Public utilities director Dan Winters explained that the power house is fed energy through it's own house power source. Without that source the cooling water pumps and fans don't work, so you can't run the power house. Winters said the breaker to that source shorted out and melted. The power house crew had to locate another breaker to replace the damaged one. The breaker they found wasn't quite the same, so they needed to modify it to get power running through the system again.

Power was not restored to the entire community at the same time because of another problem with breaker 51-1. A breaker is like a big switch and the contacts on breaker 51-1 wouldn't stay closed. Winters said they had to route the power around that breaker through a process called fuel switching that brought different areas of town back on-line at different times. That prevented the working breakers from being overloaded.

Winters said this type of malfunction has never happened before. The main breaker that self-destructed was about 40 years old and was part of a panel that was installed 25 years ago. The proper breaker costs about $3,000 and though they aren't commonly manufactured any more, there are still some available for purchase. The city has already ordered a new one.

Winters said the new power house will have redundancy circuits to prevent this problem from happening again.