North

Series of power outages affect Dawson City, central Yukon

A power outage affected Dawson City, Faro, the Minto Mine, Carmacks, Pelly Crossing and Stewart Crossing this morning. It was the third unplanned outage in two days.

One outage blamed on raven, others on generator problems

The Wareham dam near Mayo, Yukon. Two of three outages in central Yukon over the past two days were caused by problems at the Mayo hydro facility, says Yukon Energy. (The Canadian Press)

A power outage affected Dawson City, Faro, the Minto Mine, Carmacks, Pelly Crossing and Stewart Crossing this morning.

It was the third unplanned outage in two days.

Janet Patterson, spokesperson for Yukon Energy, says one outage yesterday was caused by a raven at the Faro substation. Two outages were caused by problems at the Mayo hydro facility.

Patterson says Yukon Energy wasn't able to move power from the Whitehorse grid because those lines were being maintained. 

"As we're doing this work, we've got the Mayo-Dawson grid separated from the rest and clearly there's some instability there that is showing up as more outages than anybody wants to see," she said.

Today's outage in Dawson City lasted about 20 minutes. Patterson says the affected communities are now running on backup diesel power.