Southern Saskatchewan at large may have been pounded by winds and lashed by rains in a powerful summer storm on Tuesday, but residents in the Estevan area largely avoided the damages that were seen in Regina and other surrounding areas, with its felled trees, damaged homes and downed power lines.
“We got two days of heavy rain, but didn’t have many outages anywhere until Tuesday,” said Jonathan Tremblay, a spokesperson with SaskPower. “With 100 kilometre an hour winds, it knocked down some trees, branches, and in some cases, power poles. That’s where we ran into trouble.”
A number of private contractors were brought in to help with the extensive recovery efforts necessary in the most heavily affected areas, throughout the southern part of the province.
“We had a few contracted companies that do vegetation management, especially in the Regina and Moose Jaw area,” said Tremblay. “Everyone we have who can work as linemen were certainly working.”
Most significant power outages in the south of the province were corrected by the time Tremblay spoke to the Mercury, with the exception of some rural customers.
Most of the RM and City of Estevan were left relatively unscathed by the weather, but, “there were about four or five power outage calls at a few oilfields in the Stoughton and Estevan areas,” Tremblay noted.
Although SaskPower hasn’t detected any major problems, there are some issues in the southern portion of the province that need to be immediately fixed before a more thorough survey of the southern grid can be carried out.
“I saw one or two blocks (on our map) that are out because of some downed branches or trees, in the lines. We still need to fix those immediate problems, so we can survey the entire southern grid,” said Tremblay. “(We want to) make sure no poles are half-snapped or anything like that. We have to address those first, since they pose a public safety risk.”
Tremblay noted Moose Jaw, Assiniboia and Weyburn were not as lucky as Estevan, where they had many more issues with downed power lines and toppled trees to deal with.
He said, “We (had) a tremendous amount of branches on lines; we’re talking about hundreds and even thousands, so those are things we’re trying to fix and make safe.”
Tremblay described the primary safety concerns in affected areas as downed lines, and broken masts on older buildings.
“There’s no visual cue to show if power’s still running through downed lines. People should automatically assume there’s electricity through it and stay as far away as possible,” Tremblay said. “We invite people to call 911 or call us so we can have people cordon off the area and fix that. Masts are wooden poles on top of houses that receive electrical service. When snapped, they can be very dangerous. We’re telling people they need an electrical contractor to fix that problem.”
Reported outages on account of the storm were also concentrated in parts of Saskatoon and small areas such as the Colonsay area and the Humboldt-Wadena-Yorkton corridor. Meanwhile, there were about 16,000 calls to SaskPower from a wide range of particular areas in the south of the province.
“There’s sort of a square between Regina, Moosejaw, Assiniboia and Weyburn that was the most severely affected in the south,” said Tremblay.
The storm, while hardly anything new for the Prairies, was noteworthy because of the broad area it affected, from southeastern Saskatchewan into southwestern Manitoba. Tremblay noted surveying will continue throughout the summer.
“We’ve seen more difficult and longer outages here and there, but this storm had a wide impact,” said Tremblay. “It’s the first storm in a long time that, basically, affects half the province.”
