Power dropped out across Yellowknife at 2pm on Friday in the latest of a series of outages. The NWT Power Corporation said it didn’t know what had happened.
In a tweet shortly after power was lost, the power corporation said the “cause is currently unknown.” Northland Utilities, which distributes power generated by the power corp to Yellowknife residents, said the outage was citywide.
A map of lightning strikes in the North Slave showed significant thunderstorm activity in the region of the Snare hydro system. Lightning is a frequent cause of power failures in the region.
By 2:20pm, the power corporation said work to restore power in Yellowknife had begun while power to Behchokǫ̀, also affected, had been restored.
Advertisement.
Advertisement.
Power began to return to Yellowknife buildings shortly before 2:30pm, and Northland Utilities said all customers had been reconnected as of 2:45pm.
North Slave communities take power from the same hydro system but are not connected to any broader grid, meaning a hydro failure or problem in the transmission system inevitably knocks out power.
Friday’s incident was at least the seventh outage in either Yellowknife or Behchokǫ̀ since the last week of June.
