Sick to death of power outages

Monday July 20, 2009

By Yukon News

I can’t be the only business owner in Whitehorse who is losing thousands of dollars right now because of the unending power outages.

Lost revenue, lost productivity and a long list of damaged electronics.

The last outage blew the brains out of our lighting control panel, a $4,000 hit.

A couple of outages ago it was a $2,000 circuit board for an induction cooker. It’s the second one this year.

If it’s costing me this much, what does it add up to for the Whitehorse economy? It must be millions.

Is there another city in Canada that has a worse record?

How about in the Western World? Whenever I mention to an outsider that we have had our usual 20 or so outages this year, they are stunned. They have never heard of such a thing.

My message to the people in charge of Yukon Energy is this: start taking care of your customers. We pay your bills. If you were not a monopoly, you’d be out of business. Get your act together and stop spending tens of millions of dollars building new lines while every time a squirrel or a raven makes a wrong move our whole grid goes down. Don’t tell me that the new lines are going to be the solution because one thing I have noticed is that the problem is a lot worse since Minto was hooked up. I’m sure you’ll deny this, but I’d like to see a list of all the outages for the years before and after that line was connected. I am sure there have been a lot more since.

I think you have created a monster.

I wrote this letter as a release for my growing anger and frustration, but I know there are a lot of people feeling the same way.

What used to be a mild inconvenience has become a serious issue and a major cost to Whitehorse.

Yukon Energy can dismiss my comments. They can say whatever they want but in the meantime, it’s outage, after outage, after outageÉ.

Postscript:

What a surprise- since I first wrote this letter we have had several more outages. My electronic thermostat for the dining room is now shot - $978 for a replacement.

Our walk-in beer cooler is no longer working because its thermostat is also shot.

I am going to rip it out and replace it with a manual one so I can have at least one piece of equipment that Yukon Energy can’t destroy.

Gordon Clark

Boston Pizza