SaskPower crews continue to make progress restoring service to homes that have sustained damage from the ice storms and falling branches/trees.

The SaskPower Outage Centre is reporting, that as of 2:30 p.m. on Sunday, 463 customers remain without power, though this number is constantly in decline as crews issue temporary repairs to affected customers in Melville.

All rural customers in the Pasqua district should have been restored by 4:00 p.m. today. In addition, Yorkton Rural is reporting all outages resolved, and in Yorkton City, five customers remain off.  These remaining five were to be addressed and/or resolved Sunday.

In Melville, it is estimated that approximately 15 customers were to be without power overnight, as these customers require repairs to their property and a temporary fix cannot be completed safely at this time. SaskPower crews are currently addressing 96 secondary service line outages but are making good progress in getting these customers back on.

If any customers are still without power, they are asked to call the Outage Centre to report it. Alternatively, they can report it on our website at saskpower.com/reportoutage

PREVIOUS UPDATES: SaskPower has released another update regarding customers who lost power during the ice storm from Thursday night.

On Sunday afternoon SaskPower reports all but a small amount of SaskPower lines have been repaired and re-energized as the focus remains on addressing the significant damage done to secondary service lines (the lines that connect a customer’s home to the SaskPower grid). The vast majority of customers still without power are from this type of damage.

There are a significant number of customers without power due to secondary service line damage, and SaskPower is allocating as many available resources as possible to address this damage.  They currently have 48 field workers in Melville. There are also six Vegetation Management team members working to clear branches and trees on lines currently. Normally, Melville would be staffed with five field workers.

Customers still without power are encouraged to call the SaskPower Outage Centre to report their address as having no power. The phone number is 310-2220.

SaskPower’s Outage Centre is estimating there are currently 838 customers without power (as of 11:00 a.m. Sunday morning).  This number is constantly changing, and SaskPower hopes to have many of these customers restored later today.

Saturday Update: SaskPower reports crews were able to restore power to the vast majority of primary SaskPower lines, and the remaining bulk of customers without service are from damaged secondary service lines, the lines that connect homes to SaskPower infrastructure, or service masts (equipment that connects the line to the home).

SaskPower estimates there were approximately 620 customers without power overnight on Saturday:

• Melville rural area – 200
• Pasqua district (including McLean, Vibank, Odessa, and Qu’Appelle) – 200
• Melville city – 190
• Yorkton city – 17
• Yorkton rural area – 11
• Good Spirit Lake area – 2

Update: As of 9:00 p.m. Friday SaskPower’s Outage Centre was reporting 641 outages affecting roughly 17,000 customers. The majority of the outage calls were from single customer calls.

SaskPower reported power for roughly 1,200 customers expected to remain off over night (these numbers are approximate):

• Town of Invermay – 600
• Sturgis area – 300
• Melville and surrounding rural area – 100
• Yorkton – 50
• Yorkton rural area – 40
• Fort Qu’Appelle – 40
• Regina/Pasqua district rural area (including Edenwold, Qu’Appelle, McLean) – 25
• Kipling area – 25

Despite these customers remaining off tonight, SaskPower says significant progress was made in the affected districts. Our crews will resume their work to restore power tomorrow morning.

A previous media release from  SaskPower had crews still assessing the damage caused by Thursday night’s ice storm, but said around 22,000 customers were without power as of 5 p.m Friday afternoon.

SaskPower says a large challenge being faced by technicians is the ongoing risk of additional branches falling onto power lines so significant tree trimming is needed. Some of the areas that were hit hard include Punnichy, Strasbourg, Fort Qu’Apppelle and Melville rural where power will not be restored Friday evening with no official estimated time of restoration being made because of the difficulties faced.

Since the beginning of the storm, the Outage Centre had fielded over 19,000 calls.

People are being reminded they are able to report an outage on our website at saskpower.com/reportoutage

SaskPower also wants to let customers know where repairs have been completed: there is a possibility that along with the primary lines being damaged by falling branches that the service lines connected to a customer’s home could also be damaged. If this is the case, customers will likely need to reach out to a local electrician to reconnect the service to the home. Our technicians will do their best to notify customers if this is the case.