Firstly, let’s be clear, Yellowknifers have it good by Northwest Territories standards.
Sure, some of the city’s residents lost power multiple times over a period of more than seven hours on Saturday. But think of Fort Resolution, which reported a whopping 14-hour outage earlier this year. Other communities have had similar experiences.
Even so, a power cut like the one on Saturday – which started just after 3pm on Saturday, with some residents still in the dark beyond 10pm – is extremely rare for Yellowknife. It was the longest we could find in our archive since Cabin Radio began reporting in 2018. (In a statement on Sunday, Naka Power said there had been “an equipment issue on our distribution network specifically affecting the main electrical feed to the city, which required adjustments to the system’s configuration to restore power to all customers.”)
In duration, at least, Saturday’s longest outage comfortably eclipsed a legendary 2013 power outage that occurred in the middle of winter.
According to the CBC – which, helpfully, provided precise timings in its report at the time – the December 30, 2013 outage began at 3:40pm and was resolved by 6:52pm. It was -37C that day though, compared to a high of -4C on Saturday, so 2013 probably keeps the crown as most disruptive outage so far this century.
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There may have been longer outages that simply weren’t captured in written form online, or took place so long ago that nobody documented them on the internet in the first place.
If you remember one, we’d love to know about it.
Fill out the form at the foot of this article and we’ll add recollections as they come in.
Other outages that we noted during our search include:
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- January 13, 2011: Nearly three hours, -37C again outside
- June 18, 2019: At least 90 minutes
- August 3, 2020: Two outages on a holiday Monday, more than two hours total
- June 30, 2021: Storms take out power multiple times
- September 12, 2022: Six outages in one day
Lastly, our search for information on past outages turned up a helpful Northland Utilities (now Naka Power) briefing from 2012.
The briefing looked at the frequency with which NWT communities suffered power outages at the time – and included a great diagram to explain how ravens can sometimes cause power loss. Here it is.
Saturday’s outages do not appear to have been bird-related.
Naka Power said on Saturday evening there had been a “fault to the main electrical feed,” and on Sunday added: “This was not an easy fix, but our team worked as fast as possible to investigate, resolve and safely repair the system.”
Writing to Cabin Radio on Sunday, Yellowknife resident Velma Sterenberg said that while the company’s explanation for Saturday’s outage remained somewhat mysterious, she was glad of two wood stoves to keep her home warm during the memorable 2013 winter outage.
Sterenberg had been at Saturday’s Taste of Palestine fundraising dinner, which went ahead despite the mammoth power cut.
She said perspective had been restored, even if power was not, when a child at the event suggested people contemplate how it feels to go without power for months, as is the case in Gaza, Ukraine and other parts of the world.
