Pole fire cuts power to business

A faulty insulator on a high-voltage power line shut down the Trails North Car and Truck Stop for six hours beginning early Wednesday afternoon.

A faulty insulator on a high-voltage power line shut down the Trails North Car and Truck Stop for six hours beginning early Wednesday afternoon.

“But nobody got hurt, and there was no loss of property,” Murray Swales, co-owner of the business with his wife, Donna, said in an interview this morning.

Swales said when a restaurant customer looked out and saw the power pole on fire, he alerted Swales, who momentarily thought it was another prank until he too looked out.

Minutes after a call to Yukon Electrical Co. Ltd. and a 911 alert to notify the fire department and the RCMP, a serviceman from the electrical company was on the scene,
Swales said the serviceman drove immediately to the substation just past Trails North and threw the switch to kill the power.

“I didn’t even realize he’d gone by and saw what was taking place.”

Fewer than five minutes later, the top metre and a half of the pole toppled, and the three high-voltage lines fell to the ground, Swales recalled.

He said it’s not likely there would have been an issue with the nearby gas and propane storage tanks had the lines come down hot, but he’s just as glad he didn’t have to find out.

“You really have to take your hat off to these guys,” said Swales. “When they got their people here, they were totally organized.”

Power was cut at about 12:45 p.m., and the Yukon Electrical crew had a new pole installed and rewired, with power back on to Trails North shortly before 7 p.m.

“It was unreal,” said Swales. “Like, everybody had a job to do, and they did it.

“They were really on the ball.”

Craig Steinbach, manager of customer service for Yukon Electrical, said today the cost of repairs, with labour, a new pole and hardware, is about $5,500.

The fire was caused by the failure of an insulator, which is not uncommon for the porcelain devices which keep the wire from contacting the pole.

What caused the failure could be any number of things, including erratic temperature fluctuations during the winter, which can cause minor cracking that eventually gets worse and worse and leads to a failure, he said.

Steinbach said once the insulator failed, power began leaking from the line into the pole.

In this case, he suspects power was leaking into the pole for a couple of weeks, and eventually grew hot enough to start the fire.