Yukon blackout caused by employee error

• 13 years ago (2010-08-20)
• David Flin

North America 996

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Employee error caused the grid that serves the southern Yukon in Canada to suddenly switch off on 19 August, leaving approximately 14,000 customers without power. Yukon Energy employees were upgrading the protection system when they accidentally caused the entire Whitehorse-Aishihik-Faro grid to shut down.

Janet Patterson, Yukon Energy’s Communications Officer, was unable to say exactly what happened during the upgrade to cause the outage, and said: “Something happened that shouldn’t have happened, and that caused the generation loss.”

All of the southern Yukon was affected by the outage, which lasted for 47-49 minutes. The outage followed a series of problems with the Yukon’s telecommunication services. The Internet, mobile phone, and long-distance telephone services to the south were congested for nearly 12 hours on 17 August, and customers had experienced similar disruptions on 9 and 10 August. All three incidents were caused by cut fibre optic cables in northern Alberta.