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It’s been an on and off start to the week for some people in southwest Saskatchewan.
A Friday night storm left roughly 4,100 SaskPower customers without power starting at 11 p.m., according to company spokesperson, Joel Cherry.
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It covered an area stretching from Kindersley as far south as Maple Creek.
While a temporary fix turned the power back on for everyone by Saturday afternoon around 1 p.m., Cherry said the plan was that the repair would last until a more permanent solution could be done.
But, those same people were plunged back into darkness before that could happen.
The temporary repairs stopped working late Sunday night, but Cherry said power was quickly restored for a majority of people, returning for 3,000 customers by 4 a.m. Monday.
Some time later, another 300 were back online, leaving close to 800 customers still without power by the afternoon.
According to Cherry, they’re largely concentrated to the Fox Valley area.
He expected that power would be back for everyone by 5 p.m. Monday.
Lightning likely to blame
Lightning is likely to blame for the mass outages, according to Cherry, which broke a spar on the transmission tower.
Cherry explainedthe spar is a piece of the structure, “like a cross beam, that sticks out on the one side” with wires attached to it.
The goal is to repair the spar as quickly as possible, Cherry said because “anytime the power goes out, it’s not convenient, and we understand that.”
But, it’s also about striking a balance, with crews needing more time to do repairs because of soggier conditions.
“It is wet, the ground is soft, and we need to use large track equipment to do the repairs, and so to access the site and get our equipment in place, there is a bit of a challenge,” Cherry said.
Cherry said he hasn’t heard any complaints, adding that people tend to be more understanding when there’s a clear cause for the outage.
People around Fox Valley aren’t the only ones without power, though.
An outage in Buffalo Narrows was reported at 12:25 p.m. on August 11 leaving 4,738 customers without power.
According to Cherry, crews have been sent out to patrol the transmission line.
SaskPower’s outage map has damaged equipment as the cause, with the estimated time for power restoration set for 6:30 p.m.
— with files from 980 CJME’s Roman Hayter
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