Landslides that blocked some major roads on Prince of Wales Island have been cleared, and power has been restored to almost everyone on the island.
Alaska Power and Telephone vice president of power operations Greg Mickelson says that both Coffman Cove and Hollis are on backup diesel generators while crews repair damage to power lines, but he hopes that operations will be back to normal by late Thursday.
Mickelson says that Hollis was without power for more than 10 hours Tuesday. Department of Transportation crews weren’t able to clear the debris from the only road into that community until late that night, which meant AP&T crews couldn’t get in there to crank up the generators until about 10:30 p.m.
Mickelson says that phones remain out in Hollis, and all AP&T Internet on POW remains down for now.
He says one house that he knows of was damaged by a landslide, but nobody was hurt.
While Tuesday’s storm was a big one, Mickelson recalls a much worse storm in 1993, which resulted in 20 landslides on the Hollis Road alone.