Sask. woman loses heat in the middle of extreme cold

As rolling fields around dropped into an even deeper freeze overnight into Tuesday, Morgan Ferraton’s house started to do the same.

Her fiancé Lance and she woke up at their place near Assiniboia around 6 a.m. because they were cold. She said at first, Lance, thought it was their fan, but when he shut it off the room was still cold.

Ferraton said it turned out to be just eight degrees Celsius in the house – most people’s refrigerators are set to five degrees Celsius — while it was – 37 C outside, -47 C with the windchill.

They went downstairs and found the furnace wasn’t running.

“(Lance) did everything he normally would do – and he’s pretty handy – checked everything he could check and discovered that there was no gas coming into the house,” Ferraton explained.

They called SaskEnergy and waited. In the meantime, they tried to warm up.

“We had a space heater running on our pipe under the sink and then I had my boots and mitts on… Lance had his whole entire gear on, coveralls, everything and then we had an electric heated blanket that I went and put on my little cousin who was sleeping,” she said.

Eventually, the temperature dropped to three degrees Celsius in the house, so Ferraton and her cousin went to her sister’s place to wait out the cold.

She said SaskEnergy got there after a couple of hours and said something in the gas meter had broken and it had to be replaced before gas could flow through again. Ferraton appreciated SaskEnergy being able to get the problem fixed at -50 C.

When she spoke close to noon, Ferraton was still waiting at her sister’s for her house to warm up again.

SaskEnergy said in a statement that a malfunction with a meter is rare, “natural gas meters are built to withstand Saskatchewan’s extreme weather and temperatures.”

It said the system is 99.99 per cent reliable, but if someone suspects there’s a problem, they can call the 24-7 emergency line at 1-888-700-0427.