Yellowknife endures two city-wide outages on holiday Monday

Yellowknife residents suffered two city-wide power outages on Monday.

The city first lost power at 7:30am for between 20 to 40 minutes, depending on location, then a second outage struck shortly after 2:30pm. Power began to return from 4:20pm.

On Monday afternoon, city power distributor Northland Utilities said a “loss of supply” accounted for the second outage.

The NWT Power Corporation later attributed the outage, which also affected Behchokǫ̀, to a lightning strike.

We are aware of an outage affecting Yellowknife; crews are on-site and working to safely restore power.— Northland Utilities (@NorthlandUtil) August 3, 2020

Northland ordinarily offers a map showing where power outages are taking place, but on Monday even the outage map was itself “out of service to fix a glitch,” the company said.

A review of tweets posted by Northland Utilities and the NWT Power Corporation shows Yellowknife has had at least 12 unplanned power outages since the start of April.

They took place on April 16, May 5, May 26, June 5, June 15, June 24, June 27, July 4, July 19, July 22, and August 3 (twice).