After more than a month and a half without municipal power, Akiak residents are able to power down personal generators and rejoin the city-owned electrical grid.
Temporary city administrator Aleck Jackson said that the lights came back on in Akiak just before noon on Aug. 2.
A contracted mechanic was able to repair two of Akiak’s generators at the end of July and beginning of August. Jackson said that it takes both generators working to power the village, and that a mechanic will return to the community in the coming weeks to continue work on an additional generator.
The extended power outage has been devastating for many Akiak residents who lost freezers full of subsistence food or spent thousands of dollars paying to fuel personal generators.
The nearly two-month outage was the second extended outage for Akiak this year, also due to malfunctioning generators.
In late June, the state of Alaska denied a request from the City of Akiak to issue a disaster declaration because the generator failures likely happened because of maintenance failures and not because of some other unavoidable catastrophe.
