Windstorm cut power to at least 11,800 Chugach Electric members in Anchorage

Friday's windstorm knocked out power to at least 11,800 Chugach Electric members in Anchorage, and a few hundred were still without it early Saturday.

Anchorage's strongest gusts came before dawn, according to preliminary National Weather Service reports, including 64 mph in Northeast Anchorage at 4:30 am and 66 mph near Abbott Loop at 6:15 am. "The wind is getting us now!" Chugach posted at 4:45 am, with more than 1,000 members already out, most of them because of trees.

By 10:30 am, Chugach counted about 11,800 members out in 258 separate outages. That's about 1 in 8 of the nearly 89,000 members the utility says it serves, and it was the highest count Chugach posted. The real peak may have been higher. Chugach's updates don't show whether more members were out between 6:45 and 10:30 am.

In Eagle River and the Mat-Su, the same storm cut power to more than 13,500 Matanuska Electric Association members and sent gusts to 70 mph south of Eagle River.

Around 8 am, Chugach's Southern Tie transmission line tripped between Anchorage and Hope, cutting power to Indian, Girdwood, Portage and Whittier. By 8:30 am, the utility said members from Indian to Hope should have power back. It didn't say what caused the line to trip.

At midmorning, Chugach listed three downed power lines and 23 trees in lines. Crews take the biggest outages first, the utility said, unless something dangerous, like a fire or a line across a road, needs attention sooner. Chugach warned people not to try cutting trees out of power lines themselves.

The numbers fell through the day, to about 8,000 members out by early afternoon and about 2,300 by evening. By late afternoon, Chugach was warning that some members would be without power into Saturday. At 12:10 am Saturday, 296 were still out, with the largest remaining outages in Oceanview, Huffman, O'Malley and Mountainview.

Chugach's updates didn't say how many members lost power at some point during the storm or when the last storm outage was fixed.

Chugach's meters report outages to its dispatch automatically, so the utility asked members not to use its online form for outages it already knows about. New outages or hazards like downed lines can be reported to dispatch at 907-762-7888.