After 11 day outage, Diomede’s power is restored

On March 20, the power went out in Diomede and wasn’t restored until the afternoon of March 31. For 11 days, the island’s 76 residents shared generators and made sure each other’s houses had enough heat amid below freezing temperatures. They baked bread in the school’s kitchen and found other ways to live on a limited supply of electricity.
“It’s not the first time Diomede has experienced this kind of crisis,” the village’s tribal coordinator Frances Ozenna said last Thursday while the power was still down. “But we weren’t prepared for this because we just got upgraded last year with two new generators.”
Little Diomede can only be reached by boat in summer or via helicopter service from Nome, if weather allows. Recent severe winter storms meant that Diomede’s former local powerhouse operator, Orville Ahkinga, was delayed in getting to the island for repairs. The heavy snow buried homes and entry ways in snowdrifts and created more shoveling work for residents on top of the outage.
“We’re already struggling with keeping our houses warm and the children fed with the limits we have, and it’s really hard to go out to do your chores over mountains of snow—it’s just been difficult,” Ozenna said.
Orville Ahkinga, formerly of Diomede, has the most expertise about Diomede’s power system but he now lives in Anchorage. He arrived with replacement parts via helicopter last Friday and promptly got one of the generators working again that afternoon. As of Monday, two of the generators were running. A third older generator, which had previously experienced a fire, is still undergoing maintenance.
“I hope we look at long-term alternatives to keep us having a safe powerhouse,” Ozenna said.
Of the 26 families affected by this outage, eight had portable generators, Ozenna said. Some were able to share those generators with others. Meanwhile, other households were able to get power from facilities in the village that have backup generators. Four families were hooked up to the school with a long extension cord, five were hooked to the clinic and five to the water treatment plant, Ozenna said. Another family had lost electrical service a few years ago due to a fire and now heats their home with kerosene. The school, which doubles as a shelter for emergencies, was allowing people to warm up and shower there. The school’s kitchen was also open for residents to use since large appliances could overload small generators.
It’s a delicate balance to keep a household running with a small generator that might only be able to handle a certain wattage. Even just to use a percolator to make coffee, all other electronics might have to be unplugged. Without running water, residents of Diomede don’t have to worry about frozen pipes during a power outage, but they do have to worry about food spoilage. Ozenna said her refrigerator fared fine as she was turning her generator off for about half the day then plugging it back in. Another family emptied their freezer and stored their meat outside in the cold.
Diomede’s mayor Robert Soolook said he has maintained a personal generator for emergencies since the ’90s. Every year he tries to emphasize the importance of having a generator in the village, he said, encouraging others to purchase one with their PFD or when they have enough money.
“Everyone here is trying to work together to try to maintain life without power and try to get people to have enough heat into houses,” Soolook said last week. “When it comes to things like this, it’s time to help each other a lot, especially the Elders and the people who don’t have generators.”
Soolook said the community has enough to eat and described how everyone recently got together for a meal to celebrate the first polar bear harvest of the year.
During the crisis, the Native Village of Diomede had dispensed 529 gallons of motor gas valued at $3,200 for people to power up their generators, Ozenna said. The village store was able to reopen after they borrowed a generator from one of the residents, she added. But others were having a hard time working and missing deadlines. The tribal and municipal offices had to close.
The lack of power added to the already difficult communications situation in Diomede. Telephone, cell and internet service was spotty due to thick ice coating the communication tower. Ozenna is one of eight residents who now has a Starlink satellite internet system set up in her home. They were able to keep that system running.
The power grid is owned and operated by the City of Diomede. Soolook said the municipality had previously tried to work with other utilities—such as Kotzebue Electric Association, Nome Joint Utility Systems and Alaska Village Electric Cooperative—to help maintain their power plant.
“A lot of companies said no,” Soolook said. “My belief is it’s too hard to maintain and too hard to get out here due to the remoteness. My suggestion is really to get the best things out here so they don’t always have to be maintained from the outside all the time.”
But even making decisions as a municipality is difficult in Diomede right now. Besides Soolook, there are just two other sitting members of the seven-seat city council. They need four council members to make a quorum and conduct regular municipal business.
With more chores to do but also more time with family, Ozenna said the power outage reminded her of the old days on Diomede. “It seems like a lot of manual activity is happening,” she said. Before an electric grid was introduced to the island, her parents used a seal oil lamp to heat their sod home. “We didn’t have these kinds of problems,” she said. “The sod houses that were in use were more prepared for better shelter.”
People were growing weary of the situation, Ozenna said, but also aware that negativity could be damaging in such a situation in a small community.
“Being hard on each other is not going to fix anything,” Ozenna said. “For me, I’ve learned that when we become dependent or codependent [on things like electricity], it changes how we respond or react or even how we can appreciate what we have.”
People in Diomede are used to relying on themselves. When reached on Thursday, a representative from Alaska’s State Emergency Operations Center said the office was not involved in any official response and had not received any official request for help. And because Diomede’s powerhouse is a city-owned utility, there is not much an organization like Alaska Energy Authority can do immediately.
“I wish that we were in a position, where the minute there’s a problem, to run out there and fix it,” said Curtis Thayer, the executive director of Alaska Energy Authority. “But we have a lot of communities that are that are in similar situations. It’s up to the utility to determine what went wrong, and then we if we can support them in getting back operational on what maintenance needs to be done, we do that.”
The tribal nonprofit Kawerak also doesn’t have the capacity to help a community like Diomede with its power grid, though it could act as a liaison to help relay information to the state, said Kevin Knowlton, Kawerak’s emergency preparedness specialist.
“But when we’re completely left out of the loop, we can’t help with doing that,” Knowlton said. “And it leaves it up to the small staffs at the city level or the tribal level to coordinate all that. Our communities are so resilient with responding to what most people would consider a small disaster, and they’ve been doing it for so long.”
For Knowlton, the destruction caused by ex-typhoon Merbok demonstrated that Kawerak needs to be more involved with helping the communities in the region. He said Kawerak is working on establishing legal agreements with the different communities that would allow the organization to assist with emergency management and emergency preparedness.