If you regularly drive along Loop Road, you've probably been curious about a four-pole structure adjacent to St. Paul's Catholic Church.  This Loop Road section of transmission line is vulnerable to weather-related tree damage.  When a branch hits the Loop Road line, the fault travels back to the closest transmission breaker, located in Lemon Creek.  The breaker recognizes the fault and isolates and protects the rest of the system from the outage.  This structure houses such a breaker.

Before AEL&P installed the Lemon Creek breaker, you might recall how a tree in the Loop Road line would cause an area-wide outage.  Recently, a tree in the Loop line caused an outage extending "upstream" to the Lemon Creek breaker, affecting about half of Juneau.  Now that the new breaker is operational, this type of outage may still affect many of our valley customers, but it will no longer cause an outage to our Auke Bay, Airport area and Lemon Creek customers.