The NWT Power Corporation says “raven interference” caused an outage lasting an hour to 90 minutes in Yellowknife and other communities on Sunday.
Blackouts were recorded in neighbourhoods throughout the NWT capital from around 5:10pm.
Power only began returning in some places after 6pm, marking one of the North Slave’s lengthier outages of recent months. (Elsewhere, some of the territory’s communities have endured much longer outages this winter.)
All customers had electricity back by 6:30pm, the NWT Power Corporation stated on Facebook.
In a separate post an hour later, the power corporation said a raven had been involved.
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That statement called to mind an infamous 2014 incident in which a “flaming raven” was said to have both caused a Yellowknife power outage and started a forest fire at the same time.
Yellowknife is not connected to a broader grid, making it susceptible to outages if there are problems affecting its hydro system, the Jackfish backup diesel power station or transmission lines.
The temperature in Yellowknife at the time of the outage hovered at around -16C, comparatively warm following recent days in the -20s.
