(File Photo/paNOW Staff)

By Ian Gustafson

P.A. Power Outage

Unifor labour action will not impact power outage response

Oct 9, 2019 | 1:58 PM

SaskPower said despite Unifor being on strike, it will not impact the response time of fixing power outages.

SaskPower Spokesperson, Joel Cherry, said that SaskPower has two unions Unifor and The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW).

“The people out there responding to power outages are members of IBEW, not Unifor,” Cherry told paNOW.

The Unifor employees he said primarily work in their call centre. The only Unifor position related to outage response is in the call centre, which are the people that the public will call into if there is a power outage.

Cherry said that position has been deemed essential which means several employees will remain on the job during the labour action.

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“With the outage centre deemed essential and with our power line technicians being part of a different union, there really isn’t much of an impact at all on our ability to respond to power outages,” he said.

Yesterday afternoon in Prince Albert, the community lost power as well as Shellbrook, Christopher Lake and Sturgeon Lake.

At 1:27 p.m. SaskPower released a tweet which said they were aware of the situation and had a crew on their way to attend to the situation. After a short time at 1:45 p.m. the power was restored.

Cherry said they had a line trip on their transmission system.

The basic difference between a transmission and a distribution outage is transmission lines are the larger higher voltage lines that we use to carry power from long distances often from generation facilities to substations where they are then put on the distribution system.

The distribution system is the smaller power poles that anyone would see in their back alley to carry power to a house.

He said when transmission outages usually occur, they have a larger geographical impact due to the infrastructure.

“In this case, the line tripped off and we were able to fix it fairly quickly within about 15 minutes just by remotely closing the line,” Cherry said. “I don’t know the specific cause of them, but it was a relatively easy fix.”

Despite yesterday’s power outage being a minor transmission line issue, he said one third of SaskPower’s outages are weather-related.

“We are not expecting any specific issues in the near future but we’re always at the ready and we’re ready to respond quickly regardless of what the cause of the power outage is,” Cherry said.

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Ian.Gustafson@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @IanGustafson12