REGINA – With a 15-month old in the house, Harbour Landing resident Dawn Johnson had a tough time beating the 30 degree heat on Sunday.
“Thankfully, I have an energy efficient home so the house was able to stay a little bit cooler, but it was definitely warm,” she said.
A power outage that lasted several hours meant eating out and heading to an outdoor pool, but like many south Regina residents, Johnson wants to know why it seems the same neighbourhoods are in the dark over and over again.
“We pay our bills on time and would expect to have power.”
Same neighbourhoods
While outages during the month of June have impacted all corners of Regina, a few neighbourhoods have been hit the worst.
On June 5, an hour-long outage left 3,065 residents in Harbour Landing, Lakeview and Cathedral without power. A few days later, more than 10,000 customers lost power in those same communities. On June 10 and June 23, Harbour Landing, Lakeview and Cathedral were hit again, along with other neighbourhoods.
Then the most recent outage on Sunday in Harbour Landing, the result of an underground cable fault, affected 2,200 customers for about five hours.
SaskPower upgrades
Repeated outages in the same south Regina communities can be blamed on upgrades to the Albert Park substation, according to SaskPower, because electricity is now being fed from other neighbourhoods.
“So if there’s an outage in Lakeview, it’s going to be an outage in Harbour Landing,” said Donavon Nelson, SaskPower’s director of operations and maintenance for the southern half of the province.
Albert Park has been out of service for major upgrades to increase capacity. It was supposed to be energized by May, but is still a few weeks away.
Add that on to the year’s peskiest power threat – squirrels treating power poles like their own playground – and it means tens of thousands of people losing power when it has little to do with the weather.
Still, Nelson says there’s no need to ask people to cut back on power consumption.
“Today, our generation system can handle the load we’re seeing.”
Residents are only left to bank on that being the case before more people have to sweat out the summer in the dark.
Comments