Jayda Noyes, Daily Herald
SaskPower is saying the widespread outage hitting southeastern and central Saskatchewan on Tuesday is one of the biggest since 1981.
According to spokesperson Jordan Jackle, crews got most power running again by 10 p.m. that night; however, some spots in Moose Jaw and east of Saskatoon were still in the dark.
“We aren’t entirely out of the woods, you could say, at this point,” he said at a media update at 2 p.m. on Wednesday. “We need the sun to come out and really start burning off some of that frost out there.”
Heavy amounts of frost weighed down and damaged the transmission lines. The buildup began late last week because of foggy and misty conditions.
“This is the result of a really unique weather situation,” said Jackle, adding usually the sun quickly comes out and melts the frost.
“We’ve heard of situations where there’s four to five inches of frost around a single transmission line, which really, really weighs that down.”
He said at the height of the outage, between 175,000 and 200,000 customers were impacted and SaskPower got about 45,000 calls in total.
“We’ll be working on this moving forward, especially in the days to come, as we’re looking to make those permanent fixes,” he said.
SaskPower is still asking the public to stay back from any downed power lines because they might be live.
Our crews are working hard to safely make permanent repairs to all of the damage to our lines. We appreciate your patience and your support of our crews. #SkOutage #FeelingTheLove pic.twitter.com/Tih9m9mUse
— SaskPower (@SaskPower) December 5, 2018
