Rankin Inlet was hit with a number of power outages during Christmas Day.

The electrical issues started at 3:45 a.m. on Christmas Day and were resolved as the day went on, with intermittent outages.

Rankin Inlet senior administrative officer Darren Flynn said everything was back up and running just after midnight on Boxing Day morning.

Flynn said the locations where power came back on the latest hadn't lost their power until about 5:40 p.m., so they hadn't been without electricity for that long. 

If enacted, he said the hamlet's emergency plan calls for residents to be moved into the community hall or one of the schools during emergencies, depending on availability.

鈥�The old community hall and the new arena went off at various times during the day, and every building in the hamlet had power issues as the day wore on.鈥� said Flynn.

鈥�The old community hall has a generator, but it's a bare-bones system. It doesn't provide any real amount of lighting. It only supplies mechanical electricity to keep the heat on.

鈥�There's a lot of things that go into the emergency plan. Risk assessment is one of the first things that any of us do.

鈥�We were at the point where if we knew we weren't going to be getting the power back, we were ready to start using those warming shelters.鈥�

Flynn said if that decision was made, the hamlet would have put the word out via all available means for people to head to the shelters.

If necessary, hamlet staff and the local fire department would have been called upon to move people, he added.

鈥�If we reached that point, I would have sent the fire department members around to check house to house.

鈥�A big part of the town was without power, but the vast majority had power. The thing is, under standard protocols, people know that they need to be able to provision for themselves. We also had a very abnormally warm Christmas Day, which also factored into our risk assessment.

鈥�I was one of the people who spent the longest time without power and, when I restored my furnace switch at 9 p.m., after the feeder had been on for almost 40 minutes and I knew it was stable, the temperature in my house was still reading 11 C.

鈥�It was chilly, but there wouldn't have been too many people who would have been at freezing point. Houses up North tend to be well-insulated and hold the heat pretty good.鈥�