Merci, Madame la Presidente. Sunday September 11th may stand out in Yellowknifers' minds as the day of six separate and lengthy power outages. The power blips turned off freezers, ruined dinners, and shut down consumer purchases in stores across the city. It's difficult to assess the damage or impact on expensive electrical appliances, although we know power jolts don't help. The outages even caused the loss of the city's Yellowknife River water intake, due to multiple on/off cycling failures in pumping equipment electronics.
We later learned that power supply from the Snare system was likely cut by fallen trees, but the continuing bumps were caused by the failure of our diesel backup at Jackfish Lake. Six lengthy outages in one day is possibly a mostworst record.
While Yellowknifers are accustomed to power outages, there's no way we should accept them. Although it's true that we are more susceptible to outages because we lack a large multisource power grid, the concurrent failures at Jackfish on September 11th just aren't acceptable.
It's not like this is new news, Madam Speaker. The last comprehensive look at outages was in 20122013 when the Public Utilities Board directed NTPC and the Northland Utilities to file detailed reports on the number, duration, cause, and frequency of service interruptions. Reports contained a snowstorm of information on outages ranging from seconds to more than an hour.
The main takeaway was that during two oneyear periods, Yellowknife customers experienced 119 and 100 interruptions in each of those two years. Compare that to Ontario, where there is an average of 4.78 outages per year. Yukon reported 2.31 outages per customer in 2009. Current data isn't available to show whether performance has improved, but the events of September 11th don't look like much has improved.
Cabinet wants to pour our capital dollars into ever more roads and expanding Taltson hydro supply without a customer to use the power, but we're still nowhere on getting stable power for the largest community in the NWT. I'll have questions for the Minister responsible for the power corporation on cutting the very high rates of power outages Yellowknifers face. Mahsi, Madam Speaker.
Thank you, Member. Members' statements. Member for Thebacha.
