Thanksgiving snowstorm hammers parts of Manitoba, Hydro repairs continue

Some Manitobans were still without power Tuesday morning after high winds, rain and wet, heavy snow caused outages in various parts of the province over the Thanksgiving weekend.

Manitoba Hydro said it was able to restore power to thousands of customers overnight, but the sheer number of outages — as well as weather-related road closures — meant it couldn’t get as many power lines repaired as it had hoped.

Hydro said it will update restoration times as crews assess damage and work on repairs throughout Tuesday.

Spokesperson Peter Chura told 680 CJOB’s The Start that 12,000 customers were in the dark Monday, but that number had decreased considerably — to around 3,000 — by Tuesday morning.

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“Our crews are very busy. They did a really good job, got a lot of that damage repaired,” he said.

“Some customers, unfortunately, were without power overnight, because there was some damage we just couldn’t get to, given the conditions … but crews are back on that this morning.”

Chura said some areas faced a “double whammy” of weather — with windy, rainy conditions on Sunday, followed by heavy, wet snow Monday.

“The challenge, once you get into a situation where there’s literally hundreds of individual outages over a very wide area, (is) just the sheer time it takes to get to each one.

“Once the crews get to the area, they have to patrol the lines and find out where the problem is. If there’s fallen trees and deep snow — road closures in some cases — we just can’t get to it right away.”

Chura said crews are working as fast as possible to restore power without compromising safety.

1:39 Fall weather settling in

Scott Kehler of Weatherlogics told 680 CJOB’s Connecting Winnipeg that the weekend’s conditions were perfect for causing the type of headaches now facing Hydro workers.

“It’s still fairly early in the fall, and the temperatures throughout the event were right around the zero mark, and that’s why that snow was so heavy and wet,” Kehler said.

“Surfaces are still fairly warm, so the snow sticks to them, and that’s what causes these outages — when you get that snow stuck on all sorts of things, power lines, trees and so on.”