Sunday’s massive outage becomes a police matter

It looks like Sunday night's systemwide electricity blackout was caused by a vandal with a rifle, says Yukon Energy's vice-president of operations and engineering.

It looks like Sunday night’s systemwide electricity blackout was caused by a vandal with a rifle, says Yukon Energy’s vice-president of operations and engineering.

Dave MacDonald said today four insulators on the primary transmission line running north past Long Lake from the Whitehorse Rapids dam were destroyed, causing an eventual short that led to the power outage.

“These things are way up in the air,” MacDonald said in an interview. “It is the four insulators in a string of eight, and they just do not sort of fall down.

“Somebody had to hit them with something.”

MacDonald said he’s not sure if a rifle as light as a .22-calibre weapon could have caused the damage.

Not far down the line from the four insulators, however, is a conductor that was also hit with something, he pointed out.

MacDonald suspects the damage to the conductor, and the series of wound aluminum wire that was penetrated, could only have been done with a high-powered rifle.

Yukon Energy has asked the RCMP to investigate.

The power failure occurred at 10:40 p.m. Sunday, affecting all 12,000 customers on the Whitehorse-Aishihik-Faro grid.

The first Whitehorse customers were back on about 3 1/2 hours later, with the entire system operational by 3:30 Monday morning.

The cost of restoring the grid was in the thousands of dollars, given the diesel generation required in Whitehorse and in Faro, but not including the equipment and staff cost of replacing the insulators, which will be done Wednesday, he said.

MacDonald said he doesn’t know what the multiplier would be to measure the cost to individual businesses like gas stations, bars and restaurants which were forced to close.

Yukon Energy wants the general public to be aware if they see something suspicious while they are out in the bush, they should report it, as the Crown corporation just can’t keep an eye on hundreds of kilometres of remote transmission line.

The vandals, he added, could have easily put their own lives in danger.

The line in question carries 138,000 volts, the same size of line being installed between Carmacks and Pelly Crossing, which is large enough to carry enough power to supply the Minto line and the proposed Carmacks copper mine, if it goes ahead.

He said had this occurred in the middle of a midwinter night at -40 C or -50, the threat to human safety and property could have been much worse.

“That is really the issue for me,” he said. “If somebody is out there being stupid with no regard for the comfort and safety of their neighbours, somebody could get hurt.”

MacDonald doesn’t believe the insulators were shot at the time of the blackout, but sometime hours or even days earlier.

Once the four were weakened by rifle fire, they likely became susceptible to moisture, he explained.

MacDonald said it snowed a little Sunday afternoon, and that may have triggered the onset of the failure.

He also recalled the rainy day in the middle of last week, and suspects the rifle damage occurred sometime after that.

No one from the Whitehorse RCMP could be reached this morning to comment on the vandalism investigation.