SaskEnergy doesn’t know what caused a rupture in a high-pressure natural gas pipeline between Birch Hills and Weldon that knocked out heat to approximately 4,500 homes in the Melfort area.
Casey MacLeod, a spokesperson for SaskEnergy, said there will be a review to determine the cause of the Jan. 10 and 11 outage.
“We’ve pieced together the damaged pipeline and sent it away to a lab where they have specialists to look at the remnants of the pipe,” she said. “We won’t know what caused it for a couple of weeks.”
The City of Melfort set up the Kerry Vickar Centre as a place where those that had no service could go to warm up. Service was restored by 7 p.m. Jan. 11.
MacLeod said she didn’t know how old the pipeline was or if there could be similar breaks in the future that would knock out service for customers.
“We do run a system integrity and line inspection on pipelines throughout the province yearly and we do things like integrity digs where we’ll dig up certain sections of the lines throughout the province throughout the year to see what its condition is,” she said.
The spokesperson said depending on what the results of the review are, SaskEnergy might do further inspections of the pipeline if warranted.
Rick Lang, Mefort’s mayor, said his city was pleased with how SaskEnergy dealt with the outage.
“Those circumstances come up from time to time. They’re unforeseen. They’re certainly reactionary; they’re not something that you can plan for ahead of time. When something like that hits, you deal with it the best you can,” he said. “From my perspective, I have to say SaskEnergy did an amazing job of getting everybody looked after in a timely manner.”
