Roughly 20,000 Mat-Su customers lost power for about an hour Monday afternoon, following a widespread outage caused by a cut guy-wire along the Matanuska Electric Association transmission system.
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The company first noted the outage just after 2:30 p.m. Monday. A map of the outage, showed many affected customers — just over 8,000 — concentrated in the Wasilla and Knik-Goose Bay areas.
MEA spokeswoman Julie Estey said while the outage was ongoing that crews were being dispatched to identify and fix the outage's cause.
"It's definitely a transmission line outage," Estey said. "We've got a crew headed over to Seward Meridian — we've got a report that a guide wire may have clipped one of our transmission lines."
The company tweeted shortly after 3 p.m. that they had confirmed that a cut guy-wire had caused the outage. Shortly after, power was being restored to customers.
Estey said guy-wires are typically brought down by vehicle collisions, but have also been caused by work involving heavy equipment.
By 3:30 p.m., the company said all customers had seen power restored. Anyone still experiencing an outage was asked to call 907-746-7697.