INUVIK - The Inuvik Chamber of Commerce is asking NWT Power Corp. for answers about what caused the 10-hour power outage on Sept. 28.

President Larry Peckford said many business owners in town have lost faith in the power corp.'s ability to provide continuous, uninterrupted electricity.

"Outages have not been infrequent," he said. "How do we know this won't happen again and again? We need to get a sense of reliability in the system."

The group agreed to send a letter to the power corp. at its last meeting held last week when approximately 13 members showed up.

Peckford said the members voiced their concerns and spoke on behalf of business owners who could not attend but were also affected by the blackout and the subsequent string of outages leading up to a power surge on

Oct. 8, which damaged electrical equipment around town.

"They need to give people a reason to believe that they're not running from the problem," said Peckford. "These kinds of things wreak havoc on businesses and we would be remiss if we didn't at least call on the power corp. to be accountable."

The power corp. has since set up a claim's process for people who were affected by the surge and damaged equipment is either being fixed or replaced.

Peckford also acknowledged up until now the power corp. has done a good job being upfront about what led to the power outages.

Power corp. spokesman Mike Bradshaw said he welcomes the chamber's letter. He insisted the corporation provides a reliable source of electricity by anyone's standards.

"We're comparable to the national averages: outages and reliability," said Bradshaw. "We take ourselves seriously, it's not just us comparing ourselves to ourselves."

As for September's prolonged outage, he said the last time the power corp. dealt with a 10-hour blackout was 10 years ago when one of its power plants burned down.

The power corp. has hired an Edmonton-based company Orbis Engineering Field Services Ltd. to do a complete review of the town's generation system in order to get to the root of the system breakdown.

Bradshaw will present the review's findings to town council at Wednesday's regular meeting as well as a public meeting which will be held at the community centre on Thursday at 7 p.m.

He said things are currently returning to normal.

"The good news is everything we have done has resulted in stable supply of electricity to Inuvik," he said. "We're going to continue working on it before that supply is firm and stable."

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