Watch above: Seventeen Saskatoon neighbourhoods were without power over the weekend as a wild winter storm passed through the city. Joel Senick finds out why the city’s service alert system didn’t keep people informed.
SASKATOON – A temporary power back-up has been installed to keep Saskatoon’s website up and running during power outages, according to city officials. The move comes after the city’s service alert website went down during an evening power outage Saturday that was caused by a snow storm.
The outage impacted large portions of Saskatoon’s west side and lasted for hours.
“We have put in place a back-up that will last for approximately four hours,” said Catherine Gryba, the city’s general manager of corporate performance department.
“We really apologize to all of our citizens that the website was down.”
City officials say they hope to put in place a permanent fix soon.
A report initiated in late 2014 is expected to become public early next month. Gryba said it will propose a contract for a service line to run from city hall to back up web servers.
“We are putting things in place; it was just very unfortunate that this happened before we had the back-up services in place,” she said.
The city utilized its social media accounts Saturday to update citizens on the power outage.
READ MORE: City of Saskatoon tackles cleanup of unexpected snow dump
Gurwinder Thind was working at her family’s donair restaurant on 33rd Street West when the power went out. She says Twitter kept her updated on how others were dealing with the situation.
“Everybody has phones now so it’s like the easiest way to get information,” said Thind.
Thind estimates that the restaurant had to turn away roughly 50 customers due to the outage before deciding to close its doors after two hours in the dark.
“We didn’t like seeing the customers go home because it’s a family owned business, every customer is very important to us,” she said.
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