INUVIK - The NWT Power Corp. says it will get to the bottom of Tuesday's all-day black out, as the power supplier has promised to have a third-party forensic review done on its power generating plants.

Mayor Denny Rodgers said he'll be the first in line to see a report explaining what went wrong at NWT Power Corp. to cause an all-day power outage across town on Sept. 30. - Andrew Rankin/NNSL photo

Mayor Denny Rodgers plans to be the first in line to look at the report.

"They need to ensure that they are performing to a standard, a national standard, above all," said Rodgers. "Hopefully the report will be a wake-up call for everyone," he said.

Rodgers said he is appreciative of the Power Corp.'s effort to restore power to the town last week. However, he said he's very concerned about how long the town went without electricity after a major coolant leak caused the outage.

"That's concerning," he said. "We want assurance that this type of an outage won't happen again."

Mike Bradshaw, NWT Power Corp. spokesman, said Friday that a person has not yet been chosen to perform the review, nor a date when it might be completed. He said he was planning to meet with council in the next week to discuss both matters.

The Sept. 30 outage started at about 9 30 a.m. and lasted until 10:30 p.m., when the entire town got power after the diesel backup plant was repaired.

When the outage occurred, crews were doing scheduled maintenance on the primary natural gas plant while using its backup diesel plant to power the town.

Bradshaw said those were just a few of several critical breakdowns that caused the prolonged blackout. For example, the plant's back-up generator wasn't working and neither was the natural gas plant's computer operating system, he said.

The Power Corp. was finally able to get power from the natural gas station and repair its computer system by Friday afternoon after a few temporary outages.

"It was like all the gremlins in the industry showed up on Monday and decided to have a little party," said Bradshaw.

He said he doesn't expect the planned review will produce any real surprises.

"We're not going to study it to death," said Bradshaw. "Our guys know what happened, we just don't know what things happened and when they did."

Mayor Rodgers said he will have more to say about the outage and what went wrong once council has a chance to study the review.

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