Residents across Yellowknife and Dettah have been without power for more than three hours after “wildlife contact” at the city’s Jackfish substation.
The substation takes power supplied by both the hydro plants and the city’s diesel backups and sends it out to homes. It’s a central piece of apparatus and accounts for much of the infrastructure you can see when you drive past Jackfish, on the city’s outskirts.
Reached after 7pm, NWT Power Corporation manager of communications Doug Prendergast, said it could still take an hour or more to restore power. By 8:15pm, NTPC said work was beginning to bring power back online but “the restoration process will likely take longer than usual.”
“What we believe has happened is wildlife contact at the Jackfish substation,” Prendergast told Cabin Radio.
“We haven’t been able to nail down that cause definitively, but every sign points to that.”
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Crews are investigating the issue, Prendergast said.
“We’re working on restoring hydro power from Snare [hydro station], but our ETA for power restoration is still unknown,” said Prendergast.
While Behchokǫ̀ also experienced a brief outage, crews have since restored power to the community using diesel generation, Prendergast said.
“We recognize this is frustrating – both the timing and the duration – but want to assure electricity users in Yellowknife and surrounding area that we’re working hard to get power back up as soon as we possibly can,” he said.
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In general, the power corporation says it aims to restore power to customers within 45 minutes of a blackout starting.
However, a problem at the Jackfish substation has the potential to affect both hydro and diesel at the same time – the only two means by which Yellowknife can access power.
The City of Yellowknife said it had “invoked cold-weather protocols” and set up its emergency operations committee to handle the fallout from the outage.
Municipal enforcement officers were dispatched to key intersections, with traffic lights and street lights out. RCMP had offered additional traffic control.
City facilities like the fieldhouse, aquatic centre and arenas remained open, city manager Stephen Van Dine told Cabin Radio shortly after 8:30pm, and are still running on their own backup power.
“Where residents feel as though they would like to go and have a change of scenery and warm themselves, they are more than welcome to do so,” he said.
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