Hay River residents spent most of Wednesday afternoon enduring a lengthy power outage after a diesel generator failed in some of the hottest weather of the summer so far.
Some homes got electricity back after 4pm. The NWT Power Corporation said at 5:30pm that “most customers” should have had power restored.
“We will continue to work to restore power to all remaining customers,” NTPC stated.
“Electricity demand is very high due to the weather conditions. The ongoing cooperation of customers in keeping their electricity consumption as low as possible would be very helpful in stabilizing the local electricity system.”
Meanwhile, NTPC said it was investigating a separate outage in Fort Resolution.
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The Town of Hay River had spent some time preparing its community centre as a cooling centre in case the outage persisted.
Wednesday afternoon’s temperature in Hay River hit 33C, remaining parked above 30C for hours.
The town’s outage began at around 12:30pm, when NTPC said an outage had occurred due to an “issue with a diesel engine.”
The town was taken off Taltson hydro on Tuesday for a three-week period of annual hydro plant maintenance.
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Normally, diesel generators replace hydro when it isn’t available in Hay River. However, halfway into the first day of that planned hiatus, the apparent failed generator left the town without power for hours.
NTPC said “mechanical issues at the local power plant … resulted in an area-wide power outage.”
The company later asked residents to “unplug appliances and other items so that when power begins to be restored, electricity demand is kept as low as possible, which will support further restoration as additional generation is brought back into service.”
