Industry was challenged by two costly power outages in the winters of 1955 and 1957. Power interruption in January 1955 was caused by abnormally heavy snow slides:
We had our problems, right at the beginning we had an avalanche that took out both sides of the transmission lines on January 25th, 1955, at about 12:30 pm, at lunch time. I was just walking into the staff house and the lights went out. All these breakers went off bang, bang, bang, in the Kemano switch house and I was wondering, what was going on, no lights. Well, we jumped in the helicopter. We couldn’t get up into where the avalanche came down because of fog and snow… When I got up there the next day and saw the total destruction. Well Kitimat was black. Kitimat didn’t have any power, so we set a program pretty quickly and we had power restored on the left line… So that was one experience, six months after I took over the transmission line… Of course it took months and months to restore the Kitimat plant which only had about two potlines, because everything froze and the technology at that time to restart a potline was kind of complicated. (Adam Charneski)