ALPENA POWER COMPANY
401 N. Ninth Ave Alpena, Michigan 49707
For Immediate Release
March 18, 2026 7:00PM
Contact:
Ken Dragiewicz, President and COO
solutions@alpenapower.com
OUTAGE UPDATE
Current Situation
As of 7 pm this evening 70% of our customers have been restored leaving approximately 5,100 customers without power. All available crews are working to restore outages including assistance from Thunder Bay Tree Service , The City of Lowell, The City of Bay City, City of Sturgis, City of Lansing, Homeworks Tri County Cooperative, Thumb Electric Cooperative, the Hydaker-Wheatlake Company, Premium Utility Contracting and Kappan Tree Service. In total 41 contract and mutual aid crews are assisting Alpena Power employees in the restoration effort. We express our thanks to the utilities and contractors helping in this difficult time.
Webpage Outage Viewer
We have received several questions on how to interpret the data in the web outage viewer. Here is a sample of some of the questions we have received so far.
How does the map know if my power is out?
Alpena Power’s meters at individual homes and businesses do not communicate with our web outage viewer. The system relies on customer outage calls or input from our field crews to know if there is an outage.
What do the map symbols mean?
• Hexagonal Icons: These icons display the number of meters currently without power in a specific area.
• Outage Clusters: To reduce map clutter when zoomed out, the system groups nearby outages into “clusters”. As you zoom in, these clusters separate into individual outage markers.
• Shaded Polygons/Outlines: Areas outlined or shaded on the map indicate the approximate geographic boundary of a multi-customer outage.
How are outages grouped?
Outages are grouped by the upstream protective device that has opened, such as a transformer fuse, main line fuse, or substation circuit breaker. For example, if 5 customers are all fed from the same transformer and that transformer fuse opens all 5 customers will be grouped into a single outage. In this case the Hexagonal Icon on the map would have the number 5 displayed in it.
What is the difference between “Predicted” and “Verified” outages?
• Predicted: Based on customer calls received the system will “predict” which upstream protective device has opened and will count the number of customers fed from that device. An example would be if multiple customers on a city block that are fed by separate transformers called in outages the system would predict that the upstream line fuse common to all the customers had opened.
• Verified: An outage is moved to “verified” once a utility crew confirms which protective device is open.
Why would I get a phone call telling me my power is on when it is still off?
During major outage restoration utility crews will sometimes isolate customers within an outage and restore others. An example would be if 50 customers are fed by the same main line fuse but 2 of them have significant damage to the service lines to the house. To restore the most customers in the shortest possible time the crew would isolate the 2 customers from the main line and restore the other 48. If the outage is restored before manually creating new outages for the isolated customers, all 50 customers would get an outage restoration call. In this case we would ask the 2 customers remaining out to select the power not restored option so the system would automatically maintain the outage for the customers.
Summary
As we are nearing completion of the third day of storm recovery, I want to thank our customers for their patience and understanding and the community for their support.
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