What started out as a challenge became a community effort in a matter of hours.

When David Justice, a Special Education Resource Teacher at Soldotna High School, found out his sister-in-law, Maj. Patricia Justice, would be deploying to Afghanistan, he started to send her care packages that would remind her of home while she was deployed. The best part of the boxes, she relayed to Justice, were the magazines.

“They’re just stuck in this hole, basically, they don’t have any reminders that they’re even American, so the magazines were a big hit,” Justice said.

Homer Electric Association customers account numbers have changed.

The association upgraded its software program, which required adding a zero to all account numbers. According to a statement from the utility, the zero is added in the last three digits of each account number. So, if the number was 12345-01, it is now 12345-001. The change happened immediately, and will be on all December bills.

HEA has asked members to look at their bills and update their account numbers with bill pay services.

Power at Kenai Peninsula College's Kenai River Campus was restored Monday after the school went dark Sunday night.

Homer Electric Association spokesman Joe Gallagher said the outage was caused by a fault in the underground line to the college. The association was able to set up temporary transmission to the college Monday morning, Gallagher said.

HEA was still looking for the source of the outage. Gallagher said a crew would be looking for the problem, and make repairs once it was found.

More than 2,600 central Kenai Peninsula homes and businesses lost power Sunday during a snowstorm.

The city of Kenai experienced the largest outage when the Marathon Road substation went off-line around 4 p.m. About 2,500 Homer Electric Association customers from Beaver Loop Road and along the Kenai Spur Highway through Kenai to Redoubt Avenue were without power from the outage. Power was restored by 5 p.m., after HEA reconfigured its distribution system, according to the utility’s spokesman, Joe Gallagher.