Alaska News

A mess on all fronts as Anchorage recovers from windstorm

As Anchorage residents began to pick up the pieces of Tuesday night's storm, so too were crews and businesses around Alaska's largest city.

Municipal Light & Power crews raced around town, hopping into swaying cherry pickers and repairing fallen lines and transformers.

Matthew Ramick with Utility Technology was following the electrical repair crew. While his team had only been up since daybreak, he said the ML&P crew had been out all night trying to keep up with outages.

Ramick was installing fiberoptic cable for GCI off Reeves Avenue, in an industrial area near Ship Creek, watching the electrical crew snap part of a transmitter into place. A few sparks shot out and the electrical worker hustled down and into the truck, off to the next outage.

Phone lines have been mostly unaffected, Ramick said. But as of this morning he and his crew were on standby.

"We're just here fixing little things," Ramick said. "We're just sort of waiting until we get a call."

At the Delaney Park Strip, the city's oldest park, Betty Forbes had been up since dawn clearing knocked over trees. At the Park Strip alone, six trees had fallen during the night. Forbes stood by a city Parks Department truck, covered in wood dust, looking at her Stihl chainsaw, which had just run out of gas.

ADVERTISEMENT

Forbes heads up the city crew in charge of clearing the fallen trees and the 110-foot tall Sitka spruce flag pole, part of a Veteran's Memorial, at the Park Strip.

Her chainsaw had died cutting the top of the spruce, which was erected at the site in 1999. She and four other workers were cutting the pole into small, manageable chunks. In between moving the flagpole, worker carried parts of a small spruce tree that had been smashed when the pole toppled. Another tree had been sheared down the side.

Forbes didn't know where the flagpole wood would go, but said wood from the other trees will be saved and burned in burn barrels around city ice skating rinks come winter.

Vietnam veteran Jim Vance, 62, stood at the base of the flagpole. He was part of a group of veterans who help raised money to get the pole in the '90s. He was there when the flag was first hoisted.

Vance knows that the Anchorage Parks Foundation is partnering with the Veteran's Committee to raise funds to revitalize the memorial, but he wonders what will happen now.

"I'm sorta curious what they'll do for a memorial," Vance said. "I was concerned it would topple, but not like this."

Sara Spudowski had to close her bakery and dessert house, Spenard's Sugarspoon, at 10:30 last night when the power went out. The power didn't come back on until 7 this morning, and with it being cupcake Wednesday, Spudowski figured she might as well embrace the outage.

Among red velvet and pina colada cupcakes are "Brooklyn Blackouts" -- a dark chocolate cupcake, filled with chocolate filling, topped with chocolate frosting -- named for the famous New York City cakes which were inspired by World War II blackouts.

"You just have to embrace this kind of stuff and have fun with it," she said.

Contact Suzanna Caldwell at suzanna(at)alaskadispatch.com

Suzanna Caldwell

Suzanna Caldwell is a former reporter for Alaska Dispatch News and Alaska Dispatch. She left the ADN in 2017.

ADVERTISEMENT