bengt-re / CC

It’s estimated between 175 and 200-thousand customers were impacted by the outage on Tuesday, but a SaskPower spokesperson cautions that it’s not over yet.
The frost buildup on some lines has been estimated at 10 to 15 centimetres thick.
Jordan Jackle says until the sun comes out and melts the frost, there may be more outages.
Power was officially restored to all communities by about 10 Tuesday night, with the possibility of some isolated farms.
Jackle urges anyone with a power outage to contact them.
There have been power outages against Wednesday in the far southeast corner of the province, in the Moose Jaw area and east of Saskatoon, and they too were caused by frost buildup on the lines.
Jackle explains that the weight of the frost causes the lines to sag and transmission is affected.
In one instance, two important transmission lines were affected and that’s when the 3 power stations tripped off, sensing instability in the lines.
Jackle doesn’t believe there is much that could be done to prevent an outage like this because it is such an unusual occurrence to have so much frost buildup from fog and mist.
Normally the fog wouldn’t last as long as it did.
Prevention by cleaning the lines wouldn’t work, Jackle explains, because there are 157-thousand kilometres of power lines.