Spring storm brought major outages to western Manitoba

As snow fell throughout Manitoba, the western part of the province dealt with power outages on Thursday, which at one point were impacting more than 6,000 people.

As of 9:30 a.m. on Friday, Manitoba Hydro said there are about 120 customers without power in the province. Most of the outages are in the Nopiming Provincial Park area, with some isolated outages in the Killarney area.

Bruce Owen, the media relations officer with Manitoba Hydro, said the weather caused a lot of problems for most of western Manitoba and as a result an emergency outage for the Rivers, Man. area, which is just northwest of Brandon.

"We've got some problems with our poles in the area, obviously caused by the overnight storm and the weather today," said Owen. "So we took an emergency outage to do some work at the substation there. The idea being that we're hoping to get everybody up very, very shortly and correct the problem."

Other areas, like Virden, Killarney and Boissevain dealt with outages as the storm caused broken poles and cross arms.

"We roughly had about 6,500 customers out. It's down to 3,400. Now the focus, of course, is getting the staff, equipment and machinery that we need to begin to replace some of these broken poles and cross arms."

Owen noted the affected customers ranged from Virden all the way to the Portage la Prairie area.

Owen said the main issue with fixing the poles, is having to find them.

"Some of them we already know, obviously. But in our travels, we're finding more. And then as we start to fix stuff, thinking it's fixed, we find out additional damage."

 

Adding to the problem Owen said, is that in some areas where there are broken poles, there are a lot pools of water that have not absorbed into the ground yet.

"So to access, say a broken pole or a cross arm or something, we've got to obviously get into that ditch or get around it. So it's the conditions are such in some areas (that aren't) really conducive to speedy restoration, right? So just because, you know, working on water, cold water now, and then working trying to get equipment through fields that are half thawed and half frozen is a slow process."

Owen said crews worked into Thursday evening with the goal of restoring power by Thursday night.

"I can't make that promise, though. It all depends on the weather, if we get cooperation from the weather."