The lights went out in Humboldt and a large part of the rural area last week when loaded-down power lines met with some tree branches.
According to James Parker, a spokesperson for SaskPower, issues with a transmission line that services the Humboldt area left about 7,000 of their customers without power for a time on June 6.
The outage hit Humboldt customers at about 8:50 p.m. Power was restored at approximately 9:30 p.m., but then went off again overnight.
According to SaskPower, the power tripped off a few times after the line contacted a tree.
It was out initially, Parker said, then again for about an hour around midnight, then again later in the morning.
The Crown Corporation has been moving a lot of hydro power from the north to the south of the province using these lines, he explained, and when you move a lot of power, the lines tend to sag. In this case, the sagging line contacted tree branches, which closed a safety switch, shutting off power to the line.
The switch, Parker explained, is a self-protection device on the line which helps prevent worse damage in the cause of a line overloading or touching something it's not supposed to.
Crews were able to get power restored by re-setting the line, but because of darkness, were unable to determine just where the problem was occurring, which was why the power went on and off in the night.
In the morning, crews went out on patrol again and this time were able to find where the line was contacting vegetation, Parker noted.
After some pruning of trees located about 40 kilometers south of Humboldt, near the Wolverine substation, the power was back on for good.
This was a major outage, Parker said, and SaskPower regrets the inconvenience for their customers.
"We have a robust vegetation management program," Parker said, "but there is a lot of vegetation to manage in Saskatchewan."
Normally, he added, the transmission line in question would not have been sagging to the extent where it came into contact with any vegetation. However, due to the unusual amount of hydro power moving on the lines, it was.
"We had some fairly exhausted transmittion and distribution folks who worked through the night," he said, adding that they were frustrated they were not able to pinpoint the problem in the dark.
