The fourth major power failure of the summer left much of Whitehorse and the territory without power for a prolonged period on Wednesday afternoon.
There are no details as yet on the cause of the outage. An ATCO Electric Yukon spokesperson directed The Yukon Star to Yukon Energy officials this morning.
Lisa Wiklund of Yukon Energy said “the outage yesterday, August 21, was caused by an issue with Yukon Energy’s main transmission line out of Whitehorse. When the issue with the line happened, it caused some of our generation sources to trip offline, resulting in an outage that affected most grid-connected communities except for Mayo and parts of Whitehorse.”
When an issue with a power line is detected, Wiklund explained, crews must manually inspect the line to make sure there is no risk to public safety before the line is re-energized. This can take a while to do depending on the location and length of line.
“Yesterday, Yukon Energy crews completed air and land patrols of the line and determined there was no risk to public safety,” Wiklund said.
“We were then able to bring some communities back online using local diesel generators, while ATCO completed restoration in Whitehorse. The outage lasted approximately two hours.”
Many neighourhoods in Whitehorse were without power, although the outage was very fragmented. Parts of downtown and some neighbourhoods, such as Granger, were not affected.
The latest failure in the power supply, which stretched as far as Dawson City, provoked some colourful comments on social media.
One person wrote on Facebook, “you realize, don’t you, that every time a rate increase is pending we experience power failure issues. Without fail. Not due to poor service crews for sure. Corporate interests trump public service.”
Another posted “the worst and probably one of the more expensive power grids in Canada.”
A third wrote “can we get a ‘we can’t keep the lights on’ credit on our bill, rather than a ‘we can’t run our business properly’ rider? For real, though. It’s a good thing your linemen and other workers are so good at what they do, because your management sucks.”
Yet another stated “I think we should start a petition for rebates. Honestly. The amount of outages we’ve had should reflect our payments.”
Finally, it was clear one customer was more than a little angry about the situation.
“Get your sh*t together!! The fourth time just this summer that the entire city is out. Can’t even get gas in our cars because of this useless service.”
