An ice blockage at the Aishihik power plant this morning is believed to be responsible for turning the lights out from Robert Service Way south to Teslin.

Carla Howard of ATCO Electric Yukon said today just under 3,000 customers lost power at 7:36 a.m. It was fully restored by 8:36.

The outage affected all customers to the south, including McRae, Marsh Lake, Tagish and Carcross.

Howard said power to customers in Teslin was restored within minutes with the backup generator.

“We had a problem with our Aishihik facility,” said Yukon Energy spokeswoman Janet Patterson.

“We are still in our investigative stage, but we believe there was an ice blockage of the intake at the facility.

“The Aishihik facility remains shut down, and we are sending our underwater camera out there to get a better sense of what is going on.”

Patterson said the camera was already on its way this morning and Yukon Energy expected to know more by later this afternoon.

It’s too early to say what might be required to address the problem, such as whether divers will have to be brought in, until they can confirm the nature of the problem, she said.

Patterson said the Aishihik plant lost generating capacity rather slowly, in a way not familiar to staff in the control centre at the Whitehorse Rapids Dam.

With Aishihik going down, Yukon Energy has fired up the two new natural gas generators in Whitehorse along with four diesel generators, as well as three diesels in Dawson City and one in Faro.

Of the 52.5 megawatts of load on the system at noon, 21.7 megawatts or 41 per cent of the load was being supplied by diesel and natural gas.

The rest was coming from hydro generation in Whitehorse and Mayo.

The Aishihik plant has a maximum generating capacity of 37.5 megawatts.

It’s relied upon most in the winter, as Aishihik Lake serves as a large reservoir to store water for generation in the winter time.