SaskPower crews were kept busy trying to restore power to about half of Estevan following the powerful thunderstorm that struck the city on July 10.
Jonathan Tremblay, a spokesperson with SaskPower, said their major transformer for the area was impacted by either lightning or accumulating water at around 5 p.m.
“We were able to bring it back online at around 9:30 p.m., after some fixes, so that was a good four-and-a-half hours where half the city was out,” said Tremblay.
Some of their affected customers did have power restored well before 9:30 p.m.
“What we do, usually, in these circumstance, is if we can, we reroute power around the infrastructure, so those people would have been brought back online,” said Tremblay.
People on the outskirts of Estevan would have been more likely to receive power again before 9:30 p.m.
Other customers didn’t have their electricity restored until after 10 p.m.
As of the afternoon of July 11, there was a handful of people in the Estevan area who still didn’t have power.
“We’re still getting isolated reports, here and there,” said Tremblay. “People are being impacted by things like poles under water that aren’t working very well, or seem to be bending, or, for example, a downed line here and there. Or it’s even something as banal as a large branch on a line. We’re seeing a lot of those.”
There might be a situation in which a customer doesn’t have power, but their neighbour does, so SaskPower has to isolate the remaining outages, and do it safely because of all the water on the ground.
SaskPower received a few dozen calls at their outage centre on the morning of July 11, as opposed to approximately 3,000 calls the night before. About 1,000 of those calls came from customers in the Estevan area.
They also received a lot of messages through their Twitter account.
Tremblay believes most customers handled the power outage well. They stayed safe and notified SaskPower if there was a problem, particularly if they saw a downed line.
Tremblay didn’t have a number for how many crews worked during the night of July 10, but there were five at work in Estevan on July 11. If necessary, they can draw from other districts, such as Weyburn and Regina, to restore power.
“We are keeping an eye on the radar … to see if we need to deploy additional people,” said Tremblay.
