(Whitehorse) – Yukon Energy is continuing to work into the night to restore full service on its Whitehorse-Aishihik-Faro grid. A major outage on the grid at about 1:30 this afternoon resulted in a black-out throughout the system. People from south of Whitehorse to Haines Junction and north to Carmacks and Faro were without power for several hours. While most places now have their power restored, there are still a few pockets that are without power this evening.
“This is what’s known as a catastrophic outage,” Yukon Energy spokesperson Janet Patterson said. “It began when one of our Aishihik generators when down. That put too much of a strain on the other operating generators, causing a cascade effect as one by one, they shut down as well. We were left with no hydro generation at all. This is a rare occurrence that tends to only happen every 10 or 15 years.”
Because of the complexity of the outage, it took Yukon Energy several hours to bring some of its Whitehorse hydro units back on line. It also fired up its seven diesel generators.
Yukon Energy is still working to get the Aishihik hydro generators operating again. In the meantime, Patterson urges customers to conserve electricity as much as possible during the peak morning and evening hours. She warns that if there is too much of a power demand, Yukon Energy will have to look at having rotating power outages throughout the area served by the power grid.
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Contact:
Janet Patterson
Supervisor, Communications
Yukon Energy Corporation
(867) 393-5333
janet.patterson@yec.yk.ca
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