Unalaska has had numerous power outages over the last month, but the latest one isn’t related to the previous ones.

Public Utilities Director Dan Winters says yesterday’s noontime outage was caused by a gasket failure in the cooling system. The water drained out of one of the Wartsilla engines, triggering an automatic shutoff. Winters says they started another engine to pick up the dropped load while replacing the gasket.

A recent shortage of cement has created a sticky situation for several city construction projects. Public works director Nancy Peterson says Smokey Point Concrete ran out of cement last week. They’re a subcontractor on three big projects -- the landfill’s leachate tank, the paving of Ballyhoo Road and the Unalaska Marine Center dock drainage project.

Peterson says responsibility falls on the contractors -- Alaska Mechanical, Knik Construction, and Northern Mechanical -- to keep the three projects moving forward.

Doctor Ann Nora Ehret will be replacing Doctor Rebecca Stroklund as medical director of the Iliuliuk Family and Health Services clinic.

Ehret won’t be an entirely new face around town. She was a doctor at the clinic between 2007 and 2011, when she left to take care of an ailing family member. But she says the plan was always to come back and join her partner, a Bering Sea crab captain.

"I always was going to return to Alaska as soon as that was possible," says Ehret. "We see this as a long-term working commitment."

Power problems continued Thursday night, with at least two additional outages taking out part of the grid. Assistant City Manager Patrick Jordan says the city knows the outages are related to large industrial users, but is still trying to figure out who exactly is causing the problem.

“We haven’t pinpointed that," Jordan says. "We don’t have the ability to pinpoint that with the system that we now have. But we are in communication with all of our industries, all of our peak users, trying to get them to ramp up slower and shut down slower so there aren’t any shocks to the system. And watch their use, just try to moderate their use.”

Multiple power outages over the last 24 hours were caused by power dumps from a “large industrial user,” according to public utilities director Dan Winters.

A sudden drop in power demand tripped field breakers, Winters says, shutting down parts of the grid.

None of the outages lasted longer than 15 minutes. They took place at 8:30 Wednesday night, 4:55 Thursday morning, again at 5:07 and again around 10:30

After 35 years, Doctor Don Hudson is leaving the Iliuliuk Clinic. During that time the facility transitioned from a frontier medical outpost to a modern health center, and Hudson didn’t just watch the transition -- he helped make it happen.

Hudson started working in Unalaska in 1978, right at the beginning of what he calls the “crazy fishing days.”

“In the old clinic, that stretch in front of the school, we used to have fishermen lined up in the street, trying to get in the clinic. It was not unreasonable to see 100 people in a day.”

The fishermen weren’t coming in with runny noses either. Hudson says they saw all kinds of serious ailments.

Courtesy of City Hall

Construction of the city’s new wastewater treatment plant begins today with installation of a bypass line for discharge. Alaska Mechanical is the contractor for the $19.3 million project.

Assistant city manager Patrick Jordan says work is already ahead of the EPA-mandated construction schedule, and could be complete by the end of 2014.

The Ounalashka Corporation is hoping to rezone Lot 24 for residential use. Credit: City of Unalaska

The Ounalashka Corporation is getting ready to start construction on a new apartment complex. The 8-unit building is one of the largest housing project undertaken in Unalaska in recent years, and it may be the beginning of many more.

The proposed site for the apartment building is on Biorka Drive, in a warehouse that Ounalaskha Corporation CEO Rick Miller says hasn’t been getting much use recently.

“[We're] basically [going to] strip the interior. We're going to hopefully use the exterior framing, rafters, roof, stuff like that, but everything else is going to be replaced, new.”

Crushed scrap sits next to Ron Moore's metal compactor. (Audrey Carlsen/KUCB)

Over the past year, a Virginia-based company has been helping Unalaska get rid of millions of pounds of scrap metal. They’re finally nearing the finish line, and now, they’re looking to expand to nearby islands.

It’s a problem that Unalaska has been dealing with for years – how to get rid of the huge volumes of unwanted scrap metal that pile up around the city. Shipping anything off of the island is expensive, and given the low price of scrap metal, it’s been hard to find a company that thinks it’s worth it.