Beyond the heavy wind damage an Alberta Clipper brought to Saskatchewan Wednesday night and Thursday morning, the blizzard knocked tens of thousands of people off the electricity grid from Nipawin in the northeast all the way to the Maple Creek area in the southwest.
By mid-afternoon Thursday, SaskPower reported “approximately 80,000 customers currently without power in more than 100 communities throughout the province.”
Wayne Brown and his wife live in the Midale area. They had to go without any electrical power for 29 hours, he said.
But they managed a workaround to keep the heat on.
“We just kind of disconnected the furnaces from the grid and ran an extension cord from a generator. And we ran the furnaces and the fridges (on the generator),” Brown said.
He estimated his home had the power back on sometime early Friday morning.
“We fuelled up the generator midnight last night I guess. So it would have run til about 4:30 a.m. or 5 o’clock (Friday). And when I got up to refuel, the power was on,” he said.
He’s now assessing damage to the buildings on his farm.
Brown's furnace-generator switch also proved helpful to his neighbours.
“I switched their furnace over so we could tie onto it with their generator … they were able to stay warm and toasty in their home all night.”
He switched their furnace back to the power grid Friday morning.
The blizzard’s fallout has been keeping SaskPower workers plenty busy too, spokesman Scott McGregor said in a news release.
By late Thursday night, he said about 37,000 homes and businesses were still without power, stemming from 321 outages. “Conditions were unsafe to work in, due to high winds and blowing snow.”
"If a technician has to conduct the repair in a bucket, the high winds would make that work unsafe,” he said.
SaskPower operations manager Ryan Blair said when wind speeds are at or greater than 50 km/h, linesmen won’t go up in a bucket truck; it’s too dangerous.
“That’s what made this storm even harder: Once we found the problems, we couldn’t even repair them because of the elements,” Blair said.
Being in a bucket with the wind is "cold, the wind is ripping through you and it’s another added almost distraction to the safe work you’re trying to do,” he said.
East of Regina in Pense, homeowners had to go without power for about 18 hours, from late Wednesday night until Thursday around 4:30 p.m.
The town was also the site of heavy damage to a Vitera-operated grain elevator and metal storage bins.
One storage bin had been ripped off its foundation, while another’s wall was blown inward.
There was reportedly no product lost from the storage bin. No one was inside it or the elevator, either.
By noon on Friday, SaskPower said about 4,000 people were off the grid, due to 177 outages.
