City crews continue to work around the city to get power restored. -- NEWS PHOTO SCOTT SCHMIDT
Medicine Hat News
City crews were out until 4:30 a.m. Sunday after more than 6,000 customers lost power Saturday evening.
Work is still ongoing for the city, with roughly 256 customers in the Belfast area without power.
“Today (Sunday) is going to be another full day of work, so I expect things will be back later in the evening — maybe after dinnertime,” said general manager of utility distribution systems Grayson Mauch. “The same folks that worked until 4:30 a.m. are working again today. There’s no exact time for something like this, but maybe between 7-9 p.m. things could be back to normal.”
Winds clocking in at more than 100-kilometres per hour hit the city around 6:30 p.m. Saturday and while they didn’t last long, the damage was done.
“We were hit with some really serious winds (Saturday) night,” said director of emergency management Merrick Brown. “At the worst of it, we were sitting around 6,700 hundred customers that did not have power. Power was restored during the evening and overnight. We made good progress, but eventually crews were sent home to get some rest.”
While Brown says the city never wants to experience an outage as big as Saturday night’s, he admits things could have been a lot worse.
“We don’t have to look back far at all to see how bad these things can be,” he said. “Look at October of 2017 — it was over double the people without power. We were also experiencing other disasters like helping evacuation of the Hilda fires, spot fires around the city and prolonged wind that evening.
“Obviously, it’s never something we want people to have to deal with, but things can be a lot more severe than what we had last night. Crews did, and continue to do a great job at getting people their power back.”
Mauch says the City’s main priority is safety in an event like Saturday’s.
“Before we do anything, we want to make sure everyone is safe — that goes for our workers and for everyone in the community,” he said. “We have teams that scope out the entire street before we decide how to tackle a problem, just to ensure everyone’s safety.
“After that, it’s about getting as many people their power back and how we can do it as quick as possible.”
