Yellowknifers endure one of city’s longest outages this century

Yellowknife and Behchokǫ̀ lost power for hours on Saturday afternoon in at least the second significant weekend outage of the past month.

Residents reported losing power shortly after 3pm. By the early evening, even downtown traffic lights had lost their reserves of electricity. The sound of honking vehicles filled the air at some intersections and officers deployed pylons.

Electricity began returning in some areas of Yellowknife just before 7:30pm. At that point the outage had become one of the territorial capital’s longest in decades, though the NWT Power Corporation said power had been restored earlier to some parts of the city and Behchokǫ̀.

However, the reprieve was brief.

Power went out again across the city at 8pm, leading to a fresh round of blood-curdling screams from frustrated residents.

The luckier households found themselves energized by 8:40pm. Naka Power, meanwhile, warned that work to fully restore power might take until midnight or beyond.

By 10pm, some residents were still reporting an absence of electricity.

While the NWT Power Corporation generates power, Naka Power distributes it from the power corp to the city’s homes. Saturday’s fault lay with the distribution system, the power corp earlier stated.

NTPC said there were lingering issues with one feeder – a type of power line that runs from substations to neighbourhoods. Naka Power confirmed its crews had been working on the problem. A spokesperson told Cabin Radio to read its social media channels for information.

On those channels, Naka Power stated at about 7:40pm: “Our crews determined that there was a fault to the main electrical feed to the Town of Yellowknife [sic] which caused the power disruption. We were able to isolate the issue to successfully restore power. We will continue to investigate how this fault happened to begin with.”

Later, after the 8pm outage, Naka Power added there had been fresh “technical malfunctions in our main substation.”

“We anticipate a restoration of power for the majority within the next two hours,” the company continued.

“Some areas may require a longer period of 3-4 hours for complete restoration. Our commitment to ensuring consistent power provision remains steadfast.”

Businesses close, musical scrapped

Outages like this aren’t uncommon in Yellowknife, but the sheer duration of Saturday’s incident was remarkable even by NWT standards. (Fort Smith and Fort Resolution have had much longer outages this year, but Yellowknife rarely experiences sustained power loss like this.)

“The cause of the outage remains under investigation by Naka Power as well as by NTPC. The issue seems to be located on the distribution system,” NTPC spokesperson Doug Prendergast said by email at 6:20pm.

“We have found no evidence that generation issues are responsible but will continue to investigate until power is fully restored.”

Cabin Radio had only just upgraded its battery backup to allow the station to remain active for up to three hours in the event of an outage. Within hours of that installation being completed, Saturday’s outage exhausted the batteries and the station’s audio stream duly plunged offline at about 6:30pm.

Other downtown businesses like the city’s bookstore and movie theatre reported closing early, while organizers of both a Chinese food and culture fundraiser for the NWT SPCA and a musical being staged in the city on Saturday evening expressed concern about the possibility they might be disrupted.

The musical, Children of God, was ultimately cancelled.

Still, there were some literal bright spots amid the gloom.

A fundraiser for the NWT SPCA focused on Chinese food and culture went ahead with only a slight delay, attendees said, despite hours of concern from organizers over whether they would be able to prepare the food that was central to the event.

Second major outage in a month

Yellowknife and Behchokǫ̀ were also hit by an outage on Sunday, March 16 that lasted up to 90 minutes, which felt lengthy at the time but was easily surpassed by Saturday’s blackout.

March 16’s incident was ultimately blamed on what the power corporation called “raven interference.”

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.

Behchokǫ̀, similarly, only has diesel backup generators if hydro supply is lost.

Dettah and homes along the Ingraham Trail were affected by a separate outage on Friday that also triggered brief power fluctuations in parts of Yellowknife.