SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - Yellowknife's two power providers discussed last week's hour and a half power outage at their monthly meeting Monday, and points of contention still remain.

Albert Bouchard, operations superintendent for Northland Utilities, said the outage report the Power Corporation presented him at the meeting was correct, but the information given to the media by the corporation was incorrect.

"The information that Mike Bradshaw (a spokesman for the power corporation) had communicated to you guys is certainly an unknown to us," he said.

Bradshaw wasn't in attendance at the meeting because of outages in Inuvik. He told Yellowknifer Wednesday that during an outage, "information comes as quickly as possible from internal sources, such as our system control centre or the director of the hydro region, so that information is unfolding as you're talking to me."

An incident report was sent to Yellowknifer by Bradshaw the day after the Nov. 2 outage, providing information that conflicted with statements from the utility company about the time of the outage and the time the corporation received authorization from Northland to close feeders, restoring power to the city.

For safety reasons during a power outage, the power corporation has to wait on the utility company to give authorization to close feeders, restoring power to the city.

In some cases the utility company will give an overarching go-ahead to restore the whole system, and in other cases, feeders will be identified one-by-one, said Bradshaw.

He said last week "it wasn't a universal permit that was granted ... so we proceeded to re-close feeders as we were granted permits. The final one was quite late in the process."

Bouchard said, "In that particular case on Nov. 2, our operator in charge would have given clearance to re-close the whole system, so it's one phone call, not several."

The conversation between the utility company and power corporation happened about five minutes after a squirrel came in contact with a transformer at the Jackfish Lake sub-station, causing the outage, said Bouchard.

Bouchard and Bradshaw said communication needs to improve between the generator and distributor.

"We have to stay in close contact for safety reasons because in our business, and there is no contention about this, mistakes are quite unforgiving," said Bradshaw. "I think that the monthly operating meetings are going to help."

Bradshaw said the protocols for an outage are effective, but last week was an exception to the rule.

"There are going to be outages whether it's squirrels on a suicide mission or mother nature firing up the spring lightning storms, we just have to work as hard and fast as we can to restore power."

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