Bethune radar down for scheduled maintenance

The weather radar station at Bethune is down once again.

Environment Canada’s Terri Lang explained how it went offline on Wednesday because of planned maintenance. She said the work was originally scheduled to be done a couple of weeks ago but because of the severe weather that work was held off until now, a time when the forecast looked favourable.

“It’s like your car, right. If you do regular maintenance on your car, your car will work better. It’s the same with radars.”

The station has gone down a number of times in the past several years, drawing the critique of Saskatchewan Liberal MP Ralph Goodale. Environment Canada relies on these radars to help with weather forecasting. To Lang’s knowledge, there haven’t been any unexpected problems recently. They want to keep it that way.

“These are highly sophisticated pieces of equipment so if you let them go too long without doing maintenance on them then you start running into problems.”

Lang expects the radar to be back up and running Friday sometime.