If you live in Lethbridge and haven’t experienced a power outage in the past few weeks, you might be one of the lucky ones. The city has seen several outages of late but fortunately, power has been restored quickly.
Since July 17, there have been four reported outages across the city.
In west Lethbridge, Varsity Village and the Indian Battle Heights areas were hit. Then on July 30, the Park Meadows and Winston Churchill communities lost power. Finally, on Aug. 4, there were two separate outages: one in the WT Hill Business Park and another in the Fairmont and South Gate areas.
“[It’s] probably more coincidence than anything else,” said Emilio Mantello, the City of Lethbridge’s electrical operations control room manager. “There’s times where we might experience an outage a month [and] there’s times where we might not see an outage for five [or] six months.”
When a power outage occurs, staff in the Lethbridge Electrical Control Room are the first to tackle the problem. The room is typically manned by four operators and is where they maintain infrastructure and monitor outages, among other tasks.
The city is flooded by calls and social media posts during power events, but most of the time they already know where the problem area is.
“In the event that a particular point goes into an alarm state, it sends notification into our control centre,” Mantello said. “Afterhours, those notifications go to an operator who receives a text message.”
Mantello says the most power used – citywide – is during the summertime. Despite that, he doesn’t believe the recent heatwave was a factor in any of the outages. Instead he cited a number of other infrastructure failures.