A power outage affected the Fairbanks Middle School and High School building on a chilly Monday afternoon.
Fairbanks schools were out for Thanksgiving break Monday, and students returned to school today.
Fairbanks Director of Maintenance Scott Shively said he was in his office Monday afternoon when he heard “a loud bang.”
“It was like a car hitting something or a transformer breaking,” Shively said. “One of the lines, the center line, actually came down, and that’s what that bang was because of the electric coming off of it.”
He called for workers from Union Rural Electric (URE) to fix the issue. He said workers were down at around 5:30 p.m.
Sue Gibson, director of communications for URE, said the outage occurred from 2:53 p.m. to 4 p.m. She said the outage was caused by a wire breaking.
“We don’t know why the wire broke at this time,” Gibson said, noting it could have been wear and tear that caused the wire to go down.
Shively said a URE worker told him it could have been caused by the electric wire “vibrating too much.” He was told that, since these were aluminum lines, and aluminum vibrates when electric is fed through it, the line could have broken because of excessive vibration.
Shively said most of the issues happened during the afternoon Monday, with little to no problems this morning. He said one of the problems this morning involved resetting the middle school’s boiler pump to get it online.
“A lot of the HVAC things we had reset them last night, so we knew we were good there,” he said, noting it affected “the little things,” like the elevator and some pumps. “We pretty much worked through all of the issues yesterday and this morning and got everything back to where we needed it.”
Shively said some after school activities were canceled due to the outage, including a scrimmage and sports photo-taking.
Gibson said this was an “isolated outage,” and only the school was affected.