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Chamber wants answers from power corp.
President says business people need reassurance that they can rely on power corp
Andrew Rankin Northern News Services Published Thursday, October 21, 2010
President Larry Peckford said beyond that, many business owners in town have lost faith in the power corp's ability to provide continuous, uninterrupted electricity.
"Outages have not been infrequent," he said. "How do we know this won't happen again and again? We need to get a sense of reliability in the system."
The group agreed to send a letter to the power corp. at its last meeting held last week when approximately 13 members showed up.
Peckford said members voiced their own concerns as well as other's from the community who were affected by the blackout and the subsequent string of outages that have occurred up until a power surge on Oct. 8, which damaged many electrical items around town.
"They need to give people a reason to believe that they're not running from the problem," said Peckford. "These kinds of things wreak havoc on businesses and we would be remiss if we didn't at least call the power to be accountable."
The power corp. has since set up a claim's process for people who were affected by the surge and damaged equipment is either being fixed or replaced.
Peckford also acknowledged up until now the power corp. has done a good job being upfront about what led to the power outages.
Power corp. spokesman Mike Bradshaw said he welcomes the chamber's letter. He insisted the corporation provides a reliable source of electricity by anyone's standards.
"We're comparable to the national averages: outages and reliability," said Bradshaw. "We take ourselves seriously, it's not just us comparing ourselves to ourselves."
As for September's prolonged outage, he said the power corp hasn't dealt with a 10 hour blackout in 10 years when one of its plant's burned down.
The power corp has hired an Edmonton based company Orbis Engineering Field Services Ltd. to do a complete review of the town's power plants in order to get to the root of the system breakdown.
Bradshaw will present the review findings to town council at Wednesday's regular meeting as well as a public meeting which will be held at the community centre on Thursday at 7 p.m.
He said things are currently returning back to normal.
"The good news is everything we have done has resulted in stable supply of electricity to Inuvik," he said. "We're going to continue working on it before that supply is firm and stable."
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