Saskatoon Light & Power begins repairs after major outage

It’s been over 24 hours since a good portion of Saskatoon lost power, and city officials say repairs to fix the problem are now underway.

“Right now we’re in the process of making final repairs to the part in the substation that was damaged,” explained Trevor Bell, the Director of Saskatoon Light and Power.

He expects the repairs to take a couple of weeks.

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The power outage on Dec. 3 occurred when a high-voltage switch failed – leading to a cascading effect that resulted in tens of thousands of people being left in the dark.

Bell doesn’t think the repairs will be too costly and said while parts of the power system are repaired, they can turn parts of the broken system off and repair it without creating further issues.

He doesn’t expect the repairs to lead to any further outages.

“Our system has a lot of redundancy built into it,” he said.

“It’s not uncommon to have elements in our system offline so we can work on it. At this point, there’s no significant reduction. These things happen, so we just have to make sure that we can get it safely repaired and back online.”

As the repairs get underway, Bell added they’re still trying to figure out why the high-voltage switch failed.

“We know which one failed, so we now need to find out exactly what caused it to fail,” Bell said. “Once we know that, then we can go and look at all of our other switches to see if there’s any vulnerability there. We’re always needing to maintain things and try to replace them before something like this happens.

“This one was unique because it was on our transmission ring. We’ve got those big transmission towers that go around Circle Drive for the most part and this was something that affected that transmission ring, and which is why it was such a big area.”

If a major outage in the middle of winter in colder temperatures were to happen again, Bell said the city does have plans in place to address the situation.

“I think Saskatoon has a very good track record for resolving power outages quickly in a matter of minutes or a few hours,” he said. “I think we always have to be looking towards the future. The city does have plans in place if a major incident were to happen, but we’ve never had to really enact anything like that.”

He’s confident in the city’s ability to follow through with that plan when necessary.