Kimmirut slowly comes back online after lengthy power outage

Services in Kimmirut are slowly coming back online after a four-day power outage from Oct. 31 to Nov. 3 left the hamlet of approximately 400 people with no heat or electricity.

While power is now fully restored to the community, the hamlet’s power plant was running at two-thirds capacity as of Tuesday evening, said Tina Mandeya, director of corporate affairs for Qulliq Energy Corp.

The hamlet’s health centre remained on reduced services as of Tuesday afternoon and government offices and Qaqqalik School were expected to reopen Thursday morning.

“[The plant] has plenty of generation for the community’s load,” Mandeya said in an email.

“Crews are performing maintenance on one of the generator’s auxiliary systems to improve its reliability.”

She said the cause of the outage is still being investigated.

John Main, the minister responsible for Qulliq Energy Corp., provided some more information in an interview. He called the problem “multifaceted.”

“The beginning issue was around the generation, around one of the units that was running to supply power to the town, and there was kind of some cascading or issues that were connected around generation and then also the grid in the community,” he said.

The root cause, Main said, is aging infrastructure. And the problem is territory-wide. He provided some detail in the legislative assembly this week about the nature of the wear and tear that’s affecting the plants.

“For example, the floors,” he said Tuesday in response to questions from Aggu MLA Joanna Quassa about how much it would cost to bring every Nunavut power plant within its intended lifespan.

“Cement breaks apart and it breaks the foundation or the cooling system,” Main said.

“Following the heat and the vibration within the power plants, we can encounter serious structural issues and there’s numerous concerns we have around aging infrastructure, the first being, of course, safety of our employees; our customers, the reliability of the power that we provide.”

Main did not provide a cost estimate in response to Quassa’s question, but said his team is compiling a figure in order to lobby for federal funding.

Beyond the outages themselves is the question of what a community does when a prolonged outage happens in cold weather. In Kimmirut last week, residents endured three days of sub-zero temperatures with no heat before the territorial government declared a state of emergency on Nov. 2.

The GN declared a state of the emergency in the hamlet after local leaders declared their own state of emergency, said Heather Grant, spokesperson for the Department of Community and Government Services.

“Upon the loss of power in the community, response measures were put in place that were reasonable and measured, relative to the situation to be managed,” Grant said.

— With files from Jeff Pelletier