A power outage shut down most of southern and central Yukon on Tuesday afternoon.
More than seven hours later, some customers were still in the dark.
“The entire Whitehorse-Aishihik-Faro transmission system failed at 2:23 p.m. yesterday,” wrote Yukon Energy spokesperson Janet Patterson in an email.
“Almost everyone was back on by 3:45 p.m.,” she wrote.
“But there were a few customers without power between Faro and Carmacks until 9:30 last night.”
A piece of equipment at the Faro mine caused the outage, wrote Patterson.
Called a “low side bus duct,” the device connects Yukon Energy’s transformer to the Faro mine.
The mine noticed smoke and sparks coming from the bus duct, she wrote.
“The mine is currently being fed through an alternate transformer until we can repair or replace the damaged bus duct.”
There are “protections at the Faro and/or Takhini substations which should have prevented such a widespread outage,” wrote Patterson.
“We are not sure why those protections did not work properly.
“We are investigating why the problem at Faro caused the entire grid to go down.”