A lightning strike sparked a power outage that affected both Riverdale and a portion of downtown Whitehorse late Wednesday.

Cynthia Malchow, the supervisor of customer accounting and administration at ATCO Electric Yukon, spoke with the Star this morning about the power failure.

She said the lightning struck a substation on Bell Crescent in Riverdale. The outage began at 10:30 p.m. Wednesday.

The first wave of power restoration took place at 11:45 p.m. All customers had power restored by 3 a.m. today.

Malchow said 2,300 customers were affected.

Bill Cullen, an ATCO supervisor, said the lightning strike hit a dead-end pole. He was not sure if it was the conductor or the insulator.

Regardless, the lightning raised the voltage higher that it was rated for. This caused the breaker to open, and the area’s power was shut off to protect the system.

Cullen said someone called ATCO reporting to have seen something, which helped crews remedy the situation.

This is not a common occurrence in the territory, Cullen added.

He explained that there are maybe a couple of instances or none at all during the average year. It does seem to be happening more often this year, he added.