Feathered friends cut off power twice in two days
Birds are to blame for two lengthy power outages in Whitehorse Thursday morning and this morning.
Birds are to blame for two lengthy power outages in Whitehorse Thursday morning and this morning.
Yukon Energy spokeswoman Janet Patterson said this morning a raven flew into the McIntyre substation off Range Road shortly before 8 a.m. today.
When the raven hit, the largest hydro unit at the Whitehorse Rapids Dam automatically shut itself down as it is designed to do, she explained.
ATCO Electric Yukon says power was lost to 4,500 customers in Crestview, McIntyre, Logan, parts of Copper Ridge, Porter Creek, Hillcrest, parts of the downtown and the Marwell industrial area.
It was restored to most customers shortly after 9 a.m. and was fully restored by 10:25, ATCO spokeswoman Stephanie Cunha said this morning.
Cunha said Thursday’s hour-long outage to 1,000 customers in Logan, McIntyre and parts of Copper Ridge was caused by a hawk flying into a power line.
The outage occurred at 9:55 a.m. and power was restored at 11:05, she said.
Patterson said this morning’s outage also affected the Minto Mine, which was the last customer to which power was restored.
Yukon Energy used its back-up diesel generators to restore power this morning, though the 20-megawatt hydro unit was eventually brought back on line, Patterson said.
She said the diesels were used for the emergency instead of the new natural gas units because it was quicker to use the diesels at this point instead of the natural gas units, which were brought on line last week.
Going with the diesels is still the tried and tested method right now, she said.
She said staff are still learning about the natural gas units, how they respond and so forth.
Comments (2)
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Brett Cross on Jul 12, 2015 at 9:45 am
B.C. Hydro has outage information on their website and a quick look through it reveals that birds contacting the wires is a common cause of outages there as well. This is true anywhere the power lines are above ground. At the risk of oversimplifying, the major difference is that incidents of animals contacting the electrical system in the Yukon have a higher probability of disrupting the generation/transmission grid because that grid is small. A large complex grid and its protection system/settings is more robust than a small, simple one.
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Steven Horn on Jul 11, 2015 at 1:04 am
I am glad to hear that power failures may not only be triggered by ravens but also by hawks. But I do wonder why errant animals trigger power failures at all. I am sure that here in British Columbia we have crows if not ravens and hawks in some numbers but our power does not even seem to flicker. Does ATCO or Yukon Energy have an explanation for the difference?