A spokesman with SaskPower says power has been restored to all communities in southeastern Saskatchewan affected by Friday’s severe weather that brought strong wind gusts.
Joel Cherry says earlier today (Mon), Rocanville and Welwyn were the last communities to have their power restored.
The outage affected areas north and south of the Highway 1 corridor, including Rocanville, Kenosee Lake, Grenfell, Sintaluta, Wolseley, Broadview, Moosomin, rural areas south of Whitewood, rural areas southeast of Wapella, and Sakimay First Nation.
He estimated 13-thousand customers were impacted Friday night, then by Saturday morning the number was to down to around 9-thousand – 6-thousand of whom had power restored throughout Saturday, leaving about 3-thousand customers off overnight. Yesterday (Sun) morning he said power was restored to all but about 1-thousand customers, so those in the Rocanville area, and those customers had power again today.
“We had to make repairs to our transmission system which is the larger high voltage lines because some of them were knocked down, but once the majority of that work was done we had to get out and clean up the damage to our distribution systems, so the smaller 3-phase and single-phase lines.” Cherry said of the work crews did throughout the weekend.
He did not have an approximate number of downed power lines as a result of the storm, but did say it was significant.
Cherry says if anyone still has no power, call the outage centre at 310-2220.