What happened to the ‘awooga’ button at the Gold Creek Power Plant?

Curious Juneau

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The door and disconnected doorbell to the Gold Creek Power Plant in Juneau on July 7, 2025 (Photo by Jamie Diep/KTOO)

Listen here:

https://media.ktoo.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/CJAWOOOOGA.wav

Nestled in the Flats neighborhood near Juneau’s federal building is the city’s oldest and longest running hydropower plant.

For many, the large blue building is just a noisy part of the neighborhood. But for lifelong Juneau residents like Kevin Gullufsen, the building has a fun little Easter egg.

“When I pressed this years ago, and this was about 10 years ago, it would make this really satisfying, like, ‘awooga’, sound, you know, like a Tex Avery cartoon,” he said.

Gullufsen is talking about a small, black button next to the power plant’s door on Capitol Avenue. A sign on the door states that hearing protection is required inside, and there’s a hum of machinery in the air. Gullufsen was one of many people that pressed the button as they walked by, especially in his twenties.

“I lived on the corner over here, coming out of college, and it was like our favorite thing to do coming to and from the bars with my three roommates, was to press this button right here,” he said. “And then sometimes we’d run, like we, you know, we’re little kids playing a prank or something like that.”

But the button’s silent now.

Do you have a Curious Juneau question? Submit it at the bottom of the page.

For Curious Juneau, Gullufsen wanted to know what the button is for — and what happened to it.

The answer to what this so-called “awooga button” is, is a simple one.

“A favorite of the Juneau public to push on the way by. I remember it went out from when I was a kid as well,” said Bryan Farrell, the chief power generation operator for AEL&P. “But yeah, it’s a doorbell. It is just a loud industrial doorbell.”

AEL&P owns and operates the power plant. Its office in Lemon Creek is relatively quiet, but over at the power plant, things get loud. Really loud.

“These are just the hydro units running,” Farrell said over the sound of roaring generators. “These are the diesels over here. If these were running, it’d be considerably louder.”

Back in the quieter office, he said that loud noise required a really loud doorbell.

“It used to be that there was someone within that building actually operating those units, and within that building there’s another control room,” he said. “So they’d be inside that control and that had to be loud enough to alert them in that control room.”

But Farrell said they disconnected the doorbell about five years ago, partly because of the noise.

“People do like to push that on the way by, and it is a loud sound. So if you’re in there working on something, and someone pushes that doorbell on their way by, it can be a little bit jarring,” Farrell said. “And then also, we just disconnected it because we don’t want people to be distracted when they’re in there working by them, by those loud noises.”

He says there’s also no need for a doorbell anymore either because of cell phones.

“You would just call someone knowing that there’s an operator in there to get their attention or or we would call our main operations center, and they could radio into that building,” he said.

The building’s small black doorbell is still there now, but it’s just effectively a button.

So what did it sound like? Gullufsen gave his best impression.

“It was like a mix between, like a Tex Avery thing like Wile E. Coyote going, ‘awooga,’” he said. “And then a, like a tsunami siren, because if you would hold this down, it would keep going.”

Farrell declined to give his impression. Instead, he reconnected the doorbell one more time for KTOO to capture the sound that delighted and annoyed Juneau residents for years.

Click here to hear the awooga sound!

But for now, that small, black doorbell will go back to being a defunct relic of the past.

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