Today’s Outage | Thursday, July 7, 2011

Power went out this afternoon at 13:41 to the following areas:

The southern part of Porter Creek in Whitehorse
Dawson City
Mayo
Alexco Mine

Power was restored to almost everyone by 14:06 (Hunker Creek outside of Dawson City took a bit longer and was back on by 14:13).

It appears the cause was an issue with generation at our Whitehorse plant but we are still investigating.

Near Drowning at our Lewes Control Structure | Thursday, July 7, 2011

This week there was a near tragedy at our Lewes River Control Structure just south of Whitehorse. A canoeing party of six in three canoes tried to go through the control gates, despite the prominent warning sign on the structure.

The group set off from the boat launch up stream wearing their life jackets. However within a few minutes, for whatever reason, some of them removed their safety gear.

Two of the canoes passed through one of our control gates without a problem, but the third canoe capsized. A female passenger was trapped under the water and our staff said it was several minutes before she was able to break free of the strong current. One of the other canoes came back for her and was able to pull her to safety. The second person who'd been in the capsized canoe was able to grab his life jacket and put it on before the current dragged him downstream, where he was rescued by his travelling companions. 

Yukon Energy staff were working on the structure at the time but they were not able to reach the canoeists to provide assistance.

Please, please help us get the message out that it is very dangerous to attempt to travel through the gates. There is a boat lock at the control structure and it should be used by everyone travelling in any kind of watercraft.

We are planning a public information session at the control structure this summer to help people understand why they should not travel through the gates, and teach them how to use the boatlock. Watch this blog for details shortly.

More Information on Last Night’s Outage | Thursday, July 7, 2011

Crews worked through the night to make repairs to a power pole structure and re-connect the downed high voltage transmission line that caused last night's outage. All service is back to normal, with grid communities being served by hydro from our Whitehorse and Aishihik hydro plants.

A couple of questions have come out of last night's outage that we would like to address:

1. How often are the transmission lines and poles checked?
We do annual aerial inspections (using a helicopter) of all our lines and poles. Any problems with the structures are identified and repaired. We recently inspected our Mayo to Dawson line and will fly our transmission system between Whitehorse and Aishihik, and Whitehorse and Faro/Ross River next week. This schedule was set even before last night's outage. 

2. How did a rumour get started that the dam was breaking?
We are not certain, although we have been told someone riding a bicycle in the Riverdale area noticed that we were spilling water and thought there was a breach in the dam. We want Yukoners to understand that during a power outage, once the first things we must do is start spilling water though the spill gates at our dam. That's because the water can't go through our turbines if they are not turning, and so we must spill it through our gates or the water would end up going over the top of our dam. That's obviously not something we want to have happen. Spilling water is standard operating procedure and we didn't do anything different in this regard during last night's outage than for any other outage.

Downed Line | Wednesday, July 6, 2011

A downed high voltage transmission line just south of the sewage lagoons in Whitehorse caused a wide-spread power outage tonight. Power went out at just before 8 p.m. to several Yukon communities, including Whitehorse, south to Teslin, and north to communities on the Mayo to Dawson section of the grid. The Minto and Alexco mines were also affected. Haines Junction, Faro and Pelly Crossing were not affected and their power remained on.

At the time of this blog posting (approximately 10:30 p.m.) crews were on their way to repair the downed line. We are still investigating what caused the line to come down.

Most customers have now had their power restored.

A rumour began this evening in Whitehorse that there had been a breach of our dam. That is not true. During a power outage we are not able to put water through our turbines, so we must spill it under our gates. This is standard procedure; it is one of the first things we do in any outage and that's what we did tonight. Watch this blog tomorrow for further details.

Southern Lakes Public Meetings | Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Yukon Energy has two public meetings scheduled for the next week to update people on the Marsh Lake Enhanced Storage Concept.

Wednesday July 6: 7:30 p.m. at the Tagish Community Club

Tuesday July 12: 7 p.m. at the Marsh Lake Community Centre

We will also spend some time at these meetings providing information on what we expect the peak summer lake levels will be this year.

Reporting to You | Monday, July 4, 2011

Our 2010 Annual Report is now available. If you have any questions after reading it, please let us know.

Why the Deisel in Dawson? | Monday, July 4, 2011

Today's question: why is Dawson burning diesel now? With the Stewart tie-in there appears to be a lot of available hydro electricity on the Whitehorse-Aishihik-Faro grid. Why aren't we seeing that tie-in do its work?

There was a great deal of lightning activity in the Dawson area last week. We had a number of outages as a result. Several days ago we made the decision to isolate Dawson City from the grid and use local diesel instead, to avoid any further outages for our customers there. Now that the lightning activity has subsided, we have put Dawson back on our transmission grid and there is no diesel being burned.

The energy consumption chart you see on our website is currently being converted over to show that we now have one integrated grid, so the data you see there today is outdated. We will make the conversion as soon as possible so that once again you will be able to view near realtime data.