It’s a long way to Tatitlek, Alaska. The distance from Anchorage is only about 125 miles, but Tatitlek (population 90) is like 80% of the towns in Alaska: it cannot be reached by road. Compounding the problem, the most recent Annual Highway Report by the Reason Foundation ranks Alaska last of all 50 states based on the condition, safety and costs associated with roads and bridges. Leaving from the Anchorage office of Alcan Electrical & Engineering Inc. to make a service call in Tatitlek, you have two options.

Your first is to charter a plane directly to Tatitlek. Luckily, you’re in Alaska, where there are 16 times more airplanes per capita than the rest of the country.

Your second option is to drive your service van about 60 miles to Whittier and take the car ferry from there.

If you have opted to fly to Tatitlek in a charter aircraft, you’ll get there in an hour or two. If you want to take your service van and go on the ferry boat, pack a lunch. It might take 5 or 6 hours altogether to get there.

Of course, there is a catch to taking a charter aircraft to Tatitlek. If that service job was supposed to take two days but you got it done in one day, you may still have to wait the second day for the plane to return as originally scheduled.

‘We never say no’

Despite the extraordinary challenges in this environment, Alcan Electrical & Engineering provides service and maintenance throughout Alaska from its facilities in Anchorage, Fairbanks, Juneau and Matsu.

Roger Sagraves, general manager of Alcan Electrical, summed up the company’s philosophy on delivering electrical service in the largest state.

“When a customer, old or new, calls with an electrical problem, we never say ‘no’. We service all of Alaska,” he said.

To put that promise into context, it’s worth remembering that Alaska’s land area amounts to just a little more than California, Montana and Texas combined.

Sagraves has been a very active participant in ELECTRI International task force activities focusing on means and methods of professionalizing service and maintenance. Sometimes, however, he has to apologize in advance for missing an upcoming video call because he is at a remote site where there is no network coverage.

We have concluded, therefore, that delivering electrical service and maintenance in Alaska is much like taking a space trip to the moon. 

If you’re heading out to a remote customer’s site in Alaska, you’d better have brought along everything you can imagine you might eventually need. And you’d better have a thorough understanding of the customer’s systems.

Chrys Fleming, company president and co-owner, has lived through many such assignments. One big job this year was in Bethel, in western Alaska. The only way in is by air or aboard a “summertime barge” up the Kuskokwim River from the Bering Sea. 

“Planning and logistics are everything,” he said. “If you miss the barge, you have to airfreight everything you need—including rigid steel conduit!” 

Jesse Hale, vice president and co-owner, explained that everyone at Alcan Electrical envisions their role as being far more than great electricians. They strive to be trusted advisers to their customers, especially with respect to compliance with NFPA 70B. They make commitments in service contracts that predictably provide an unparalleled level of comfort to customers in the remotest of outlying locations.

Elevated service

To provide an even higher degree of added value in NFPA 70B support to their customers, the team decided that they needed field service software with features they could not find in the major brands they tested and evaluated. They wanted software that would prepare them for anything that might come up on a remote site. 

With the kind of self-reliant innovation and independent spirit that life on the edge of unending wilderness must inevitably breed, the Alcan Electrical team plunged into the development of their own software. Out of that group effort came a finished product they have trademarked as NorthGrid.

They are now making NorthGrid available to service-oriented electrical contractors in all 50 states. It’s been thoroughly road-tested in Alaska, and we can all imagine what that means.

david gonzalez