Black bear electrocuted after it climbed an Anchorage power pole

Some Mountain View residents lost power Thursday when a black bear climbed a power pole and was fatally shocked by electrical equipment.

The incident was reported at about 6 p.m. near Thompson Avenue and Schodde Street, according to Ken Marsh with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

Alaska Wildlife Troopers and Anchorage police responded, Marsh said.

Police didn't have details on the bear's age or gender, according to Lt. John McKinnon.

"What the caller said to police was that a bear had climbed a utility pole, and they thought that the bear had been electrocuted and fallen off," McKinnon said.

[Brown bear struck by vehicle on Glenn Highway euthanized by police]

Mandy Kitchen, a resident of the neighborhood, said she called Municipal Light & Power and spotted the carcass after noticing power was out in the area.

"This bear and others have been around for a while," Kitchen wrote in an email. "(I) went out to see where it happened, saw the dead bear (in) the neighbor's yard."

Alaska State Troopers spokeswoman Megan Peters wrote in an email that "there was no trauma observed that would suggest anything but electrocution" in the bear's death.

Marsh didn't have word on why the bear might have climbed the pole.

"We don't know," Marsh said. "Black bears will frequently seek refuge up trees if they're threatened."

Mark Johnston, Municipal Light & Power's general manager, said an initial call reporting the outage came in at about 5:40 p.m. About a dozen customers had lost power, which was restored in roughly an hour.

"When our crew went out to see what the problem was, they found the bear," Johnston said. "It came into contact with a part of the transformer which is electrified."

The dead bear was found at the base of the pole, Johnston said. ML&P hadn't received any reports of bears in the area or climbing poles prior to the outage.

[Bear breaks into Colorado house, plays the piano but not very well]

Both Marsh and Johnston expressed surprised at Thursday's outage.

"It's kind of an unusual deal," Marsh said. "We have ravens and squirrels that get electrocuted and sometimes take the power out, but it's the first time I've seen a bear do that."

"This is the first time I'm aware of, at least in our service territory, of a bear causing an outage," Johnston said.

Fish and Game contacted someone on a list of people interested in salvaging game animals to retrieve the bear's carcass, Marsh said.