Between thirty and forty thousand Saskatoon Light and Power customers were left in the dark today after a high voltage power switch in the northwest corner of the city failed.

Director of Saskatoon Light and Power, Trevor Bell, says the lights were out between 1:36 and 4:00 p.m. He adds that these types of outages don’t happen often.

“I would say that they are quite rare. These kinds of outages happen once every few years. Definitely not something that we see annually.”

He says customers in the city’s west, north, and east were impacted, with Saskatoon’s central and southern districts going mostly unaffected.

“We don’t know why the switch failed. Our effort was put into trying to restore power first and make it safe. Now we’re going in and taking a closer look at that switch and see exactly why it failed.”

He says it could have been weather-related or caused by a different external force.

Numerous traffic lights were also impacted, backing up traffic at major intersections such as Circle Drive at Avenue C.

Saskatoon Public Schools decided to dismiss students for the remainder of the day due to the outage.