SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - Half-baked bread and grilling meat were casualties of power outages several times in the past few weeks, but for restaurant owners, the blackouts are more costly than a spoiled meal.

Despite having power surge protection and battery back-up, Subway owner Ranilo Ramirez said his computer system wouldn't re-start after a power outage last week. - Elizabeth McMillan/NNSL photo Brown-outs, blackouts, burn-outs Inconsistent electricity takes its toll on electronics, with low voltage, or brown-outs, causing damage to televisions and computers. Robin Williams, store manager at Roy's Audiotronics, said at least one person comes in after every outage with a piece of electronic equipment that has stopped working properly. "It can manifest itself in many ways," said Williams. "It happens to everyone once if you've been here for 10 years or so." The store manager said problems range from a portion of a television screen that no longer shows an image, to fried hard drives and mother boards. A burst bulb in television sets from the early to mid-2000s are very common in DLP Projection and LCD models, he said. Laptops typically have built-in adapters and aren't as affected. He recommended people consider UPS voltage regulators that correct brown outs, as well as guard against surges. Stuck in an elevator The lights sputter, the ground heaves then stops. Suddenly you're stuck in an elevator under the eerie glow of emergency lights. The scene is familiar to moviegoers, but getting trapped in elevators isn't only for the big screen. Fire chief Darcy Hernblad said there are typically a dozen incidents a year in Yellowknife where the power goes out and people get stuck in elevators stalled between floors. The most recent incident happened on July 29, when an Environment Canada employee was leaving his fourth-floor office in the evening when the power cut. After 15 minutes, he called the department on his cellphone. "Each circumstance is different, ideally we restore the power and have it do it's normal movement," Hernblad said. In the case of the man stuck in the Nova Building, the fire department contacted ThyssenKrupp Elevators, who Hernblad said are the best people to get the elevator lowered. "The guy walked off and everything was OK. It was uneventful but people get claustrophobic after they're trapped in there for five, 10, 15 minutes," he said. "They may start to panic a bit. But when we arrive on scene we try to reassure them ... we will eventually get the person out."

On Saturday night, residents saw the lights go off between 6 and 7 p.m. Jeff Barbutza, general manager of Northland Utilities, said lightning at the Snare hydro power plant also caused two different outages around 7 p.m. on July 29, leaving 7,000 customers in Yellowknife without power for over an hour.

Robert Schmidt, director for the power corp.'s hydro region, said the strikes on July 29 hit the power station. On Saturday, lightning hit both Snare and the Jackfish Lake Power Plants. In total the power corp. has 220 lightning arresters that direct the current into the ground but Schmidt said it isn't possible to prevent all lightning damage. He said there's only so much room on a building and more arrestors won't necessarily help.

"Lightning, you can't control it, you can't control where it hits. You can just minimize the damage," said Schmidt.

But while it might not always be possible to redirect lightning strikes, it's still causing issues for residents.

On Friday, customers of the downtown Subway restaurant watched as employees punched prices into a calculator. Owner Ranilo Ramirez said the computer system got zapped during Thursday night's outage, despite having a power surge protector in place. When he went to re-boot he couldn't login.

"The business, it slows down," he said. "Any item that we have that's supposed to be computerized, we had to check it on the board, enter it manually (and) calculate the GST manually."

Though damages to the computer may only cost $500, Ramirez said he spent several hours on Thursday night assessing the damage, and closed the store without a computer system. He had to call an additional employee to work the next day, so customers wouldn't notice any delays. This carried additional expenses, and added several hours of work until sales were keyed in once the system was up and running mid-afternoon. He said customers and staff were understanding but it made for a stressful period during the lunch rush and the costs add up. During Thursday's outage, he said Subway lost 60 foot-long loaves of bread baking when the electricity went off, a loss that otherwise would have translated into hundreds of dollars in sandwich sales.

"It's awful, it's terrible," said Harvey Bourgeois, owner of Sam's Monkey Tree. Thursday night's outage happened just as the restaurant and patio were full during the popular beer and burger night.

"It's hard when you kick people out to get them back in. They've gone home, they're not going back out," Bourgeois said. "They're not happy about it."

He said the utility company should do a better job of protecting businesses who lose money though staff wages and food that had to thrown out.

"They have to deal with it," he said. "If I have all the food on the line, it all ends up in the garbage ... There's no compensation from the power corp for damages. But there's damages so there should be."

Prior to Saturday's outage Barbutza said there were 13 outages in the city so far this year, all of them related to generation and transmission. Those numbers are "relatively the same as last year," he said, though he didn't have a specific number from mid-2009.

He said businesses can prepare for outages by installing back-up systems for their computers and tills, and generators to deal with the loss of power. But "You're kind of at the mercy of Mother Nature with regard to the lightning," Barbutza said. "We can't predict (lightning strikes)."

But in the Yukon, the Yukon Energy Corporation has taken a different approach to unplanned outages by trying to avoid them altogether.

A few years ago, after noticing an increase in lightning storms in the region between Mayo and Dawson City, the corporation decided to start monitoring the weather and switching to diesel fuel pre-emptively before lightning struck transmitters, said Janet Patterson, communications supervisor for the corporation.

She said since it was usually just an hour or two at a time, it wasn't a huge increase in rates as the energy producer does not typically generate electricity from diesel for long periods of time.

Customers do lose power, "but not nearly as often," said Patterson.

"We pay very close attention to the weather forecasts."

Patterson didn't have specifics on the number of outages since the change was made or specific costs.

Thirty years ago, there was very little lightning in the Northwest Territories, said Schmidt, yet "now we've had 60 lightning events in the Yellowknife area this summer."

When asked about Yukon Energy's solution to lightning storms, Schmidt said customers would have to cover the "significant cost" of the extra diesel fuel. While it could be feasible for the power corporation to switch over during spells of bad weather, he said it would take more than an hour to switch the system over to diesel and difficult to make the change if a sudden storm came up.

"If we switched to diesel every time there was lightning in the area, we would have been on diesel at least 60 more times this summer," said Schmidt, adding 60 days of diesel would cost $750,000 and running on diesel for 24 hours requires 100,000 litres of the fuel.

Barbutza said he didn't think it would be worth it to switch to diesel when storms roll in.

"It's a weigh-off there. Is it worth the high cost? Costs are already high already," he said." The best bet is to stay on the hydro. It's the most economical, and it's clean energy and good for the environment. Put up with a couple little outages rather than burn diesel."

The Department of Environment and Natural Resources reported 17,160 lightning strikes in 24 hours within the NWT and northern Alberta between 6 a.m. on July 29 and 6 a.m. on July 30, many of them in the area around Yellowknife.

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