Power fully restored in Whitehorse area after 9-hour outage on –35 C day

Power has been fully restored to the Whitehorse area as of 12:21 p.m., according to Jay Massie with ATCO Electric Yukon, following an outage that lasted just shy of nine hours for some.

About 150 people who live north of Whitehorse waited the longest for their power to be restored.

The outage occurred at 3:30 a.m. and affected approximately 2,000 people in the Crestview, Northland, Takhini trailer park and Whistle Bend areas in Whitehorse. It continued in Ibex Valley and north of the city to Lake Laberge.

The high in Whitehorse on Tuesday was –35 C, according to Environment Canada, marking the coldest day of winter so far this season.

Stephanie Muckenheim's power came back at around 11:10 a.m. She lives north of the city.

"Luckily I had filled up the kettle with water and I have a propane stove so I can make coffee," she said. "[I'm] boiling it on the stove. Note to self: buy a percolator ... and more batteries."

Atco's Massie said earlier this morning he'd hoped to have everybody back online by 9:30 a.m.

Power was restored gradually.

"We have to do it in small chunks," he said. "It's been off since 3:30 a.m. It's really cold. So there's going to be a lot of load that's involved. So we have to do a very stepped process to get everything back on in a stabilized manner."

There were about a dozen people working to get power back up. 

• FROM 2013 | Yellowknife without power for 3 hours at –37 C

Massie said crews repaired a broken wire on one of the main lines near the Mayo Road. He said he's not sure why it broke in the first place.

"We're going to bring the wire that broke in and have a look at it," said Massie. "See if it was a manufacturing defect or something like that."

An outage hit Haines Junction on Sunday night, affecting about 500 people for a few hours. Some elders were moved to a warm spot during that outage. There's no word on what caused it.