An equipment failure on the power line near the Yukon River Bridge turned the lights out on 500 households and businesses for more than four hours Wednesday.

Ed Sager, the spokesman for Yukon Electrical Co. Ltd., said this morning an insulator on the line was cracked and gave out at 4:30 p.m. yesterday.

'Crews were dispatched immediately and determined the cause to be a failed insulator on a power pole near the Lewes River Bridge,' says a press release issued by Yukon Electrical.

'Repairs were completed and all customers had their power restored by 8:50 p.m.'

The non-stop rain through the day may have had something to do with the failure, Sager said.

The outage affected most customers between the Carcross Cutoff and Teslin.

Gordon Smith, co-owner of Johnson's Crossing Campground Services, said this morning the four hours and 20 minutes without power cost him money.

It's not unreasonable to expect better customer service when you're paying $1,400 a month for power during the summer tourist season, Smith said in an interview.

Adding insult to injury, Smith said, he was assured by Yukon Energy that a mobile generator was about to leave Whitehorse to power up his business until the problem could be found.

Three hours and twenty minutes later, said Smith, the power came back on but no generator had arrived.

He said he had to shut down the kitchen and the gasoline pumps, and the campground was empty as travellers were not interested in stopping for the night if they couldn't have access to power or water.

Guy Morgan of Yukon Energy recognizes why Smith is upset.

Johnson's Crossing is a customer of the Crown corporation, and not a customer of Yukon Electrical, just because of the way the system was divided when the two utilities went their separate ways in mid-1990s, Morgan confirmed this morning.

Morgan said the Crown corporation does whatever it can to satisfy its customers.

There are, however, different circumstances that have to be considered, he said.

The lead hand for the system control centre at the Whitehorse Rapids Dam said the operator on duty was told that if Yukon Electrical was unable to pinpoint the problem within two hours, the mobile generator was to be sent to Johnson's Crossing.

It's a question of efficiencies and money, Morgan said.

He said to automatically call in a driver and a lineman and dispatch them to Johnson's Crossing the second the power goes out is not efficient, particularly if the power comes back on 10 minutes later.

There was a plan in place to move the gen-set if there had been no word within two hours, he said.

As it was, the crew from Yukon Electrical informed Yukon Energy just short of the two-hour mark that the problem had been isolated, and that it wold take about two hours to fix.

Morgan said the Yukon Electrical crew did well to isolate the problem as quickly as it did, as it's difficult to detect failure on the type of insulator involved.

He said if the mobile generator had been dispatched after the problem was isolated, it would have arrived just as the lights were coming back on.

Had it been in the middle of winter at -40, said Morgan, time considerations would have been different.

Wednesday's lengthy outage came a day short of the five-month anniversary of the massive power failure that plunged most of the territory into darkness on the frosty afternoon of last Jan. 29.