Power outages in Regina’s Northwest causing frustration among businesses and residents

Several power outages throughout the week in Regina’s Northwest is the cause of much frustration for many businesses and residents.

At Regina’s Pet Depot in Normanview Crossing, the impact has even affected sales as customers have been turned away.

“Customers get upset because they have no way to access my debit machine and that really gets them because everybody lives on debit and credit,” sales associate, Jeannette Galbiati said.

In the back of the store, the grooming business has also taken a hit as appointments were cancelled and rescheduled.

“Unfortunately we make commission and we are self-employed so we just lose the rest of the pay,” dog groomer, Lise Regnim said.

Brewsters was also without power for two hours on Wednesday and again Thursday morning, forcing the restaurant to close its doors.

“Our AC went off so we had to close down early yesterday actually because it was too hot in here,” general manager, Richard Arockiasamy said.

Further North in Lakeridge, power outages at Capital Ford Lincoln shut down their computer system.

“Quite frankly it makes it awfully tough to try to keep customers upbeat and so forth when they have to wait based on the digital age we are all currently involved in,” senior manager, Jeff Longley said.

There have been four outages in the past five days alone, all in the city’s Northwest. Some have lasted up to six hours and impacted around 8,000 customers.

SaskPower says a storm caused the first one last Friday and blames the other three on equipment failure and wildlife.

“We see about a third of all outages caused by wildlife, another third caused by aging infrastructure and another third caused by storms,” SaskPower spokesperson, Jordan Jackle said. “It’s unfortunate that they’ve all been experienced by the same area of the city and it really is just an unfortunate situation.”

Each year SaskPower invests around $1 billion dollars into updating aging infrastructure across the province in order to help prevent future outages.

“We know that there is infrastructure across the province that is reaching the end of its life so talking about the Tuesday outage, this is something that we are aware of and it is something we are taking steps to fix,” Jackle said.