NORTHEAST — SaskPower is saying the power outages the province faced was caused by frost buildup that resulted in the power lines falling and sagging.
SaskPower received 33,000 calls in their Outage Centre on the morning of Dec. 4, which is equal to all the calls they received in November. With the exclusion of isolated incidents,
the power was back on by the end of the night.
According to SaskPower in a press conference on Dec. 5, between 175,000 and 200,000 customers were impacted by the power outage.
“That would be one of the biggest outages, if not the biggest outage since 1981 when the entire province went down for some time,” said Jordan Jackle, media relations with SaskPower’s Corporate and Regulatory Affairs. “So that’s obviously is a large scale outage that really speaks to the magnitude of this.”
A number of schools throughout the Northeast were impacted by the outage.
“We had outages in a few of our communities but power was restored very quickly, luckily,” said Don Rempel, the North East School Division’s director of education. “Schools always remain open because if there is an outage in schools there likely is the same at home so our priority is always to keep students safe, whether it is extreme weather or outages or water shortages or whatever we try to keep the school open throughout the day anyway – and Tuesday worked out well because the power was restored very quickly in this area.”
Rempel said that while sending home students in extreme weather is uncommon; there is still a policy in place.
“We do have a policy where you can send students home, but the school would always remain open because there might be parents who aren’t home or parents we can’t get hold of to pick up their students. So generally the school is always open but we might make accommodations around not running buses or in some instances having to billet students in extreme weather with a safe place that’s close to the school. But generally schools continue to operate.”
SaskPower said this wasn’t caused by a weakness in the infrastructure.
“I think this is a result of a really unique weather situation,” Jackle said. “Often times when you do see frost the sun comes out and burns it off. Where this time it was allowed to grow and grow and grow.”
When power is out, SaskPower warns residents to not try to remove frost from lines themselves, as they could still be active. They also warn not to use a generator unless a transfer switch is installed, as it will feed power back into the power lines creating a risk to employees working to restore power on the lines.
“We need the sun to come out and really start burning off some of the frost out there,” Jackle said. “We’re still asking everyone to avoid going near any sagging or downed power lines, assuming everyone out there is live. If you do see that call our Outage Centre, 306-310-2220.”
