Power corp caught by surprise
Glen Vienneau
Northern News Services
Yellowknife (Dec 13/00) - The recent spell of cold weather is being blamed for last Friday's power outage.
The shutdown started at 5:15 p.m. when low oil levels became congealed due to cold weather, said Dan Roberts, director for central operations of the NWT Power Corp.
"The problem is that we weren't expecting the unit to shut down," said Dan Roberts, adding, workers were caught off guard.
As a result, the transformer at the Jackfish substation automatically went into shut-down mode, a feature that kicks in when the oil cooling the transformers is low.
"It's one of these things that all we can do is apologize," said Roberts.
"There's a many number of things that can go wrong to shut the power down, usually we'll catch it before it happens."
Although he was disappointed by the outage, fortunately, he said, employees noticed another transformer which was low on fuel levels and the problem was immediately corrected.
"About 50 per cent of the customers in Yellowknife had power back on within 35 minutes," he said.
Power for the rest of the city was restored within an hour, except for the Frame Lake South area, which suffered a one hour 50 minute outage.
A failed breaker caused by the outage prompted workers from Northland Utilities to make a alternate power feed into the Frame Lake area, explained Al Mueller, consumer service and operations supervisor for Northland Utilities.
