Tara Kearsey
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Aug 02/00) - Although three power outages affected areas of the city in the past two weeks, the NWT Power Corporation is commending its employees for an impressive response time.

The first power failure, on July 21 at about 4:23 p.m., occurred when lightning struck the Snare Hydro transmission line supplying power to Yellowknife.

Parts of the city were backed up by diesel generators, including the Stanton Regional Hospital, within 10 minutes of the outage.

Customers were affected in several areas around the city, including those in the vicinity of City Hall, Fort Gary Apartments, Matonabee subdivision, McNiven Place, Northwest Tower, Sissons residential and William McDonald school.

All power was completely restored within 45 minutes, said Norm McBride, operations superintendent for NTPC.

"That was a nice smooth outage for us; all our personnel were still at work and everything went together really quick for us.

"We can never get the lights on quick enough for a lot of people, but that one went extremely well," said McBride.

The second outage occurred July 23 at about 1:25 p.m., and was due to maintenance being performed at the Snare Hydro System.

"An oil level switch was inadvertently activated which caused the unit to shut down and this, in turn, affected some generating stations or units at Snare and Bluefish Hydro," said McBride.

He said he had not yet seen the report from that outage, but did know the failure affected mostly residential customers in the Frame Lake and downtown areas.

Personnel from the control centre in Yellowknife powered up the diesel units and electricity was restored to all affected customers within 11 minutes, said McBride.

"It's scattered throughout the city whenever there is an outage like that," he said.

Lighting strikes

Lighting was responsible for a third power loss in Yellowknife and Rae last Thursday for about one hour.

Both the transmission line and communications were hit by lightning at the Snare Hydro System, 200 kilometres northeast of Yellowknife, said Al Mueller, consumer service manager for Northland Utilities Ltd.

"Lightning has been really bad this year," he said. Northland is the company that buys the power from the NWT Power Corporation and distributes it throughout the city.

The power in Yellowknife went out at 4:26 p.m. and was restored at 5:24 p.m. It was later restored in Rae.

The loss of communication added to the problem for the corporation which had to send a crew to Snare to restore power.

Another problem was the lack of diesel power to cover the entire city as two back-up generators were being overhauled.

Despite the many power outages over the past month, McBride said it's normal for this time of the year.

"We're on normal track like every other year. With lightning outages, there's not much we can do about that.

"It's just Mother Nature hitting the transmission line. If we knew a way to avert that, we would," he said.

But warmer weather is making the situation worse, he added.

"Every year the lightning season seems it's just getting a bit longer."

Although no power outages were caused by lightning last summer, lightning continued until September.

"We didn't experience that 15 years ago, even 10 years ago. (Then) as soon as we got into the month of August the lightning died right down."