Prince Albert residents in two areas of the city can expect to be without power this weekend.
SaskPower is completing two projects at the request of the city, and will have to cut service to certain areas of Prince Albert in order to complete the work.
On Saturday, areas east of Hwy. 3 will be without power from about 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. Some rural areas beyond Sunshine Road will also be affected.
According to SaskPower spokesperson Jordan Jackle, the outage will impact about 500 customers.
The Crown Corporation was, though, able to install a switch to keep Cornerstone operating.
“Those businesses do have power,” Jackle said, “which, as you can expect, is pretty important as we’re heading into the holiday season here. The only business we’re aware of that will be impacted is a drive-through bank teller.”
The city’s sewage plant will also lose power, but workers have been made aware of the outage and have plans in place.
The Saturday outage is planned to connect power grid improvements to the Cooke Municipal Golf Course, capacity improvements requested by the city
“We’re doing upgrades there on the water pumping station,” explained city manager Jim Toye.
We’re redoing the golf course’s sprinkler system. It’s a $1.3 million project that gives us much more efficiency, but we’re going to need more power to ensure that system is going to work properly.”
SaskPower has done a lot of work to minimize the extent of the outage.
“We’ve done a lot leading up to this on the back end,” Jackle said.
“It’s a matter of connecting it to the entire electrical system, which will involve replacing some lines, in some places underground lines, so people will see our crews out and about doing that.”
The second outage is planned for Sunday between 9 a.m. and noon.
That outage will affect an area between Second Avenue West and Central Avenue from 19th Street to 30th Street, about 250 customers.
That outage is to connect power upgrades to the city’s new water reservoir.
“It hasn’t had any work on it since 1955,” Toye said. “It’s old services. We need additional power to deal with that upgrade (which) ensures we can pup water throughout the city.”
Jackle said a number of factors went into deciding when the outages would occur.
“We recognize that power outages are an inconvenience for our customers,” he said.
“No one likes it when their power is not on, but for us to do this work , make these upgrades and do it safely, we do need to turn it off.”
