Terry Halifax
Northern News Services

NNSL (Mar 12/99) - Yellowknifers were left without power briefly on Wednesday, when a repair line fell during line maintenance.

The outages were a result of service being conducted on one of the two power lines leading out of the Snare Lake Hydro System.

Northwest Territories Power Corporation vice-president of Operations, Rick Blennerhassett, explained there are two lines leading out of the facility -- one old line built in 1948 and a newer line running parallel that was constructed in 1989.

Blennerhassett said while the new line is currently under repair, NTPC is splicing around the faulty section of new line.

"We tie the two lines together with a set of jumpers," Blennerhassett said.

"We're using a piece of the old line so that we can take a piece of the new line out and do repairs to it."

The power outage occurred when this splice became disconnected, he said.

"One of those jumpers opened up. We're not sure why or how it opened up, but it is a temporary connection and we discovered it hanging down."

NTPC has been working to repair some faulty splices in the new line.

"A portion of the new line is out of service, while we replace some defective splices," he said.

"This was an unusual occurrence and it shouldn't happen again," he added.

Supervisor of Consumer Services and Acting Manager for Northland Utilities, Allan Mueller, said the two corporations strive to work together to keep the customers happy.

"We all work together to try to provide as much power as the communities require," Mueller said.

"Should there be a failure at some point on their end or ours, we work together to try to help each other out."

Wednesday's power bump was quickly remedied with auxiliary power to avoid a lengthy disruption in service, Mueller said.

"In this case we had enough power from the diesel generators to compensate, but we were nearing the peak period and had no more generating capacity."

The peak periods for power consumption is between the hours of 4:30 and 7:30 pm, Mueller said.

The utilities urge consumers to power down during these times.

"We do that in an attempt to keep facilities like the hospital, fire, ambulance and airport services running," he said.

"People can help us by keeping unnecessary lights turned off, not cooking or cleaning until after 7:30," he said.