By: Darcie Khounnoraj
Some of the province woke up to dark, cold mornings and without the service of power in their homes and businesses on Tuesday morning, December 4th. Areas east of Saskatoon, areas in and around Moose Jaw and Regina and in most of south east areas were impacted by the sudden and lengthily power outages.
“The power was officially restored to everyone impacted by the widespread power outage in the Southeast part of the province (Tuesday throughout the day). By about 10pm at night, that’s when we got Carnduff and Oxbow areas back online, so there wasn’t anyone without power overnight -there was a chance that there were some isolated farms without power,” SaskPower spokesperson Jordan Jackle commented at a power outage media scrum in Regina on Wednesday, December 5th. “The outage centre had received about 45,000 calls related to (Tuesday’s) outage. We were able to get an estimate of how many customers were impacted, we’re looking at the height of this outage at somewhere between 175 to 200 thousand customers impacted. That would be one of the biggest outages, if not the biggest outage since about 1981 when entire province went down for some time.”
The affected areas were not quite out of the dark yet, the sun needed to shine and give off some additional heat to help melt some of the packed-on hoar frost off of the lines. Customers, both residential and business, were as patient as they could be, despite the cold weather outdoors.
“We were getting calls from our major industrial customers saying ‘get (the) residential customers back up first, you can deal with us afterwards’. It really gave us the availability and the flexibility to work on getting people’s home (power) back on.” Jackle discussed with the media, assuring that several organizations had been involved in finding solutions in a timely manner.
“This was damage caused by frost, which started accumulating late last week with those foggy and misty conditions. We are still working to repair, permanently repair, some of the damage that we saw over the course of the last few days,” explained Jackle. “It really columnated (Tuesday) morning at 9 o’clock. We had seen a lot of damage to our infrastructure in the south east but at 9 o’clock we lost two very important transmission lines in the south east which caused the outage. The level of grid instability caused by that transmission loss is what caused our power stations Poplar River Boundary Dam and Shand to go down – they tripped off.”
“In the days leading up to (Tuesday) we actually had staff in the field responding to a number of outages across the province, a little bit more isolated though on account of that frost, so were already into the fatigued management cycle by the time (Tuesday) rolled around. And by that, I mean that SaskPower takes safety obviously very seriously, it’s number one priority when we’re dealing with a situation like this,” Jackles answered a media representative concerned about the safety of the linesmen. “So, the way that works is we can’t have staff out that we feel are fatigued because that presents a serious safety issue for themselves and for the public. We need to assure that everyone is rested up and able to be performing out there. In terms of staffing, it’s something we pay very close attention to, managers would be keeping a very close eye on who’s been out in the field and for how long.”
At the time of the media scrum, there had been no calculation in the way of damage cost to SaskPower or to the province. Residential and business buildings may also see damage impact through loss of product, personal needs and electronic property.
With more than 157,000 kilometres between transmission and distribution line in the province, a lot of areas were affected during this particular weather situation. The transmission lines failed at several locations and did obtain some damage along the way. There was a structural issue that made them shut off, however, by cutting some of the shield wire off, SaskPower managed to get some of the power back on. Approximately four to five inches of hoar frost have grown around the lines, making the lines droop, resulting in drooping and damaged lines. Jackles exclaimed: “This is a unique weather situation – this frost was allowed to grow and grow and grow – the frost hasn’t had the opportunity to have the exposure to the sun.”
SaskPower advises to visit their Outages section for all the information you need to know when the lights go out. To report an outage call 310-2220 or 1-888-355-5589.
