Shishmaref experienced power outage for four days

The entire city of Shishmaref lost power last week when their main generator went down Wednesday night, the outage continued until power was restored Sunday night.
On Thursday morning Alaska Village Electric Cooperative, or AVEC, the Anchorage-based village cooperative utility that also serves Shishmaref, heard about the outage from a local plant operator.
According to the operator the main generator was leaking a lot of oil, around 20 gallons was found on the floor.
AVEC operators in Anchorage worked with the crew in Shishmaref over the phone to temporarily restore power on Thursday, but it didn’t last long due to an issue with the backup generators, according to CEO of AVEC Bill Stamm. By Saturday about half of town had power back.
While the restoration was underway, people in Shishmaref were experiencing no power in below freezing temperatures.
“Luckily the school opened up the doors for anyone who experienced a longer outage,” Village Public Safety Officer Barrett Eningowuk said.
The school’s backup generator allowed the building to maintain power. During the outage people went there to warm up, make coffee and charge devices.
“We had some elders come in during the day because it was just cold in their homes. We able to give them a private spot, away from our children,” Principal of Shishmaref School Terri Schuetz told the Nugget.  
At night the school offered their multi-purpose room as warm place to sleep. Some residents were able to use the kitchen to cook a hot meal for their family.
“The mayor hired a couple of people to come in and supervise the individuals,” Schuetz said.

What went wrong?
Most communities served by AVEC have one large generator that carries the winter load and two smaller ones that can take the load off larger electric needs and act as a backup. The outage came as a surprise to the crew and the AVEC staff.
“That’s the strangest thing, usually there’s some smoking gun you can figure out where the oil came from,” Stamm said. “And they could not find anything wrong with it.”
While the crew worked to restore the main generator, they fired up the two smaller units but were unable to get both to run together.
By Saturday, a mechanic from AVEC made it out to Shishmaref, but he was only able to get one small unit working, granting part of town power for Saturday and Sunday.
Finally on Sunday night the big generator was refueled and brought back online, restoring full power to all of Shishmaref.
It’s still unknown what went wrong.
“We still have a mechanic on site working to figure out why the other two units wouldn’t play nice together, and we’re sending parts to him so we’ll have that backup,” Stamm said.

Elsewhere
On Monday night power went out in Savoonga. Strong winds caused feeder lines to snap, disturbing the entire power system and causing it to “trip offline,” Stamm said. The power was restored by plant operators by 9 a.m. Tuesday, November 19.
In Nome, the power went off for 20 minutes on Friday afternoon. The cause is still unknown, NJUS Operations Superintendent Thomas Simonsson told the NJUS board at their November 19 meeting. “We’re zoning in on the PLC [programmable logic controller or control system],” he said. “Something tripped in there and we are looking into what exactly that was to address that.”