The Jokers of NALCOR

They even lie about the name of the company

Jokers from a deck of Newfoundland playing cards designed by woodcut printmaker, illustrator, and graphic designer Graham Blair. Image: EGH

NALCOR must be the Beothuk word for liar.

In the middle of the day in the middle of a hot summer with very little demand on the system, Newfoundland had a blackout that hit pretty well everywhere on the island.

Sudden.

Unplanned outage in the words of Newfoundland Power.

The cause of the outage was a problem with NALCOR subsidiary Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro and in the early reporting the cause was something to do with Muskrat Falls. People assume that every blackout involves the Falls these days if only because Muskrat Falls - still not finished, still not working as promised and it never will - has caused a string of sudden blackouts. Before Muskrat blackouts were odd things that happened when the weather was really bad somewhere. Massive ice storm that took down key lines. That sorta thing. Literally once a decade kinda things before Danny’s Dream. With Everyone Else’s Nightmare now up and running, we call it Tuesday.

When he met the press, Hydro vice president Rob Collett told reporters the outage had nothing to do with either the generating plant or the Labrador-Island link. He talked about how something called a circuit breaker tripped. Put air quotes around circuit breaker to get the feeling from the media reports for the way Collett explained how the whole thing was caused by a trip at a switchyard. Collett likened it to what happens in your house, which is vaguely accurate but not really.

Then as the briefing went in - here’s the CBC version - Collett said the thing that had nothing to do with Muskrat Falls had to do with Muskrat Falls.

He said it happened at the Muskrat Falls terminal station, where the Muskrat Falls generators tie into the system and the Labrador-Island link.

"When you disconnect them from each other, there's no power to flow over the Labrador-Island link. And when that happens, there's a shortfall of supply on the island," said Collett.

"So when the supply and the demand aren't equal, we have to cut the customers off using, again, these circuit breakers."

None of that explains what happened but it is a very Doug Piranha-like story, like the sketch about twin crooks from an episode of Monty Python titled - eerily enough - “Face the press.”

I decided then to open a high-class night club for the gentry at Biggleswade with International cuisine, cooking, top-line acts, and not a cheap clip joint for picking up tarts, that was right out, I deny that completely…

Not about at all but really about. Not a pre-emptive denial in this case with NALCOR but the moral equivalent.

Like “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

Not (x) equals (x).

The rule of opposites.

Funny in a comedy sketch. Not funny in a company with a well-earned reputation for lying confirmed during the inquiry into the Muskrat Falls fiasco and still at it, apparently.