By Sheri Monk

The Southwest has been plagued with electricity failures this year. The most recent was on Mar. 12 when power went out across the region at 1:30 p.m.

However, while it was restored for most, customers north of Liebenthal and west to the Alberta border were powerless until seven in the evening.

A midget provincial hockey game scheduled to be held at Leader was hastily relocated to the Maple Creek Community Arena. As well, the lack of power made set-up for the annual Leader Fusion Dance Competition a challenge. Businesses closed for the afternoon after it became apparent the power was not coming back on in the near future.

“We brought everyone back on after dispatching an airplane to fly the line to determine the problem. It turned out a conductor was down because of a broken crossarm on a structure. It took a little longer to fix it because the downed conductor was in a very sandy area and so access was an issue. We think some of the other outages in area during the past few days were caused by the broken crossarm,” explained James Parker, spokesperson for SaskPower.

Intermittent power outages, including one last weekend for over three hours couldn’t be diagnosed earlier because heavy fog prevented an airplane from surveying the line for damage.

Power problems earlier in the year were in part the result of a severe winter storm in January, which caused extensive damage throughout the system. Heavy, unusual and frequent fog has further hampered the grid. Fog becomes dense, heavy frost and ice on the lines, which causes them to snap. Additionally, Lee Mamer, Swift Current construction superintendent for SaskPower, says Leader and area is at the end of a very long arm of electricity – a problem compounded by the age of the lines, which are approximately 50 years old.

“Leader is at the end of a long, long line, so everything that happens, you see it. Those lines are fifty years old and they’ve been stressed pretty good over the years,” explained Mam. “We do patrol that line every year and we’ve done a fair amount of maintenence on it. The line is roughly 150 miles long and goes through that Sandhills country most of the way and to Swift Current. And it actually feeds across the river to Eston too, so it’s a long chunk of line.”