The cause of Wednesday’s widespread power failure – the latest in a series – is still under investigation, according to spokespeople from Yukon Energy and ATCO Electric Yukon.

“It always takes some time to figure out cause,” Erin MacDonald, ATCO’s senior marketing and communications advisor, told the Star Thursday morning.

Whistle Bend, areas north of Whitehorse, Mayo and Dawson City were all affected by Wednesday afternoon’s outage, with 5,013 customers and their family members losing power overall.

Most of these were in Whistle Bend, which had 3,235 customers experiencing the outage.

According to MacDonald, the outage began at 2:12 p.m.

Power was restored to all customers by 3:02 p.m.

The power failure follows two power outages across the region last Sunday, with 11,176 customers losing power the first time and 6,175 the second.

ATCO is responsible for most of the Yukon’s power delivery, essentially the poles and wires, while Yukon Energy deals mostly in power generation.

There are a couple exceptions.

According to Yukon Energy communications manager Lisa Wiklund, Yukon Energy is involved in distribution in Mayo and Dawson City, which were communities affected by the latest outages.

ATCO manager Tony Badry said early Thursday afternoon he is unsure if this outage is related to last Sunday’s outage, as they are still analyzing data to try to determine the cause.

“They didn't find a cause last night, so we are looking deeper into it today, pulling data out of the field from our equipment, and we will have to go through and analyze it,” he said.