SaskPower was forced to shut off power to most of Prince Albert on Saturday afternoon. (file photo/paNOW Staff)

By Rob Mahon

SaskPower On Outages

SaskPower offers update, timeline of weekend outages

Nov 21, 2022 | 3:00 PM

A relatively small power outage turned into two city-wide outages over the weekend as SaskPower dealt with the fallout of a car crashing into some of the Crown company’s infrastructure. Fortunately, both wider outages were quick.

The first, smaller outage happened early Saturday afternoon after the car crash.

“The power was knocked out to approximately 800 customers due to a motor vehicle accident,” SaskPower spokesperson Joel Cherry said. “We were able to do some switching and get most of the customers on by late afternoon.”

From there, however, there were more outages still to come as they tried to repair the damage from the initial crash. The transmission line, which carries power to a larger number of customers, had to be repaired and that meant another outage later in the afternoon for a wider area.

“In order to complete the repairs to this line, we had to turn two transmission lines off on Saturday,” Cherry said. “Eight thousand customers were off intermittently as we completed the final repairs to make sure the power would stay on for good.”

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Given the number of people without power, the short length of the outage was a welcome piece of good news, as the outage lasted around 15 minutes, which was within their goal of 20 minutes.

“In some cases, it just can’t be avoided,” Cherry said. “In order to complete a repair safely, we have to turn off the power. Planned power outages are a regular part of our maintenance province-wide… In this case it’s a bit different because it’s an emergency repair, we had to get out and repair something that had been damaged the day before.”

Work continued even into Sunday on a tricky repair, and as the work rolled on, SaskPower workers found they needed to have another outage. This one fell early Sunday afternoon, and was quickly wrapped up as well.

“It was between 1 and 1:30 p.m., and it looked like we had power back to all customers by 1:09 p.m., so it was actually a little shorter than that,” Cherry said.

According to Cherry, this kind of collision between a vehicle and a pole is relatively rare, as weather or wildlife are much more likely to cause outages. Whatever the cause of an outage, he said the company’s goals remain the same.

“We realize that any outage is inconvenient,” Cherry said. “Nobody wants the power to be off for any longer than it needs to be. We try to get out there as soon as we can safely get out there to restore power. Obviously, sometimes there are weather conditions or other safety concerns that might factor in when we’re getting out to do our repairs.”

Cherry added if you ever encounter a downed power line, you should assume it is live even if it is not sparking.

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rob.mahon@pattisonmedia.com

On Twitter: @RobMahonPxP