Power outage leaves hundreds in the dark

by: Ryan Kiedrowski

Wednesday April 04, 2007

Along with a nasty blast of winter on Wednesday, March 28, around 500 people were left without power before sunset. Just before 6 p.m., power to an area covering the communities of Nipawin, Carrot River and up to Cumberland House was down due to a transformer at the Codette substation.

"It looked like something had damaged the cable," said Larry Christie of SaskPower. "It might have been a rodent because the cable looked like it had been chewed on and that's not an unusual situation."

By around 8:30 p.m., the lights came back on and those affected could blow out their candles.

Another outage occurred during the following day just before 5 p.m. This time, around 1,000 SaskPower customers in the communities of Nipawin, Carrot River, Red Earth, Shoal Lake and Zenon Park were left without power for an estimated five minutes.

"Something came into contact with the line. The line is of course fused, the protective system was activated and it went down and had to be manually induced," Christie explained. "When it was induced, it came back up and it held."

While there were no reports of a downed line, Christie suspects the incident was either weather related or an object such as a tree branch simply coming into contact with the line.

The Nipawin Journal