Cause of the Elsa/Keno Outage

We reported yesterday that we were flying our transmission line between Mayo and Keno yesterday to try to determine the cause of the most recent outage. We did that, and as suspected, we found that heavy snow was the culprit.

We were helped in our sleuthing by an employee of the Alexco mine, who reported seeing a flash of light on the line near the minesite.

We inspected the area, and found that heavy snow had pressed a conduction down onto a crossarm on one of our poles, causing the outage. We cleared the snow from the conduction and returned it to its proper position, and it is now working as it should.

We re-energized the line at 2:12 yesterday afternoon and the Alexco mine had power very shortly after that. We kep the residents of Keno on our back-up generator as a precautionary measure and they remain on diesel for now. We are watching the weather forecasts and will make a decision soon about whether to put Keno back onto our grid.