McGregor isn’t aware of any major rerouting projects that are scheduled now, but for anyone curious there is an easy way to stay up to date.
“Any sort of reinforcement work to our power system would be all on our website, saskpower.com/projects. That’ll have a pretty big list of any sort of major line work that we will be doing. It usually is just new construction that we would have on there, power lines, but if there is a substantial rerouting of lines or a moving of lines, that might make its way onto that page as well.”
It was reported earlier that SaskPower was going to have over 300 power poles to replace in the north due to the wildfires that ravaged most of northern Saskatchewan earlier this year, but while that does sound like a lot, it isn’t a totally unexpected expense. While it’s nearly impossible to budget for how much equipment needs replacing every year, they already had a stock of new power poles ready to be put up this year.
“It changes every year, like one year we might not have any wildfires, we might have wildfires but none that would necessarily impact our equipment. If it’s burning out between where our lines are running, then obviously we don’t have to worry about that as much other years. It might be in the winter time that we see the largest amount of equipment damage from storms, so it’s really hard to put a specific number on what we are planning for the following year, but that said, we do plan for these contingencies and have the extra material on hand.”
Saskatchewan has seen two major storms roll through over the course of the last two weeks, and that has lead to some delays in repairing the damaged infrastructure as well.
“Last week’s storm, as well as the one that that rolled through around the PA area, Candle Lake, and Shellbrook area the week before, whenever a really powerful storm rolls through, there’s a chance that our infrastructure may be impacted by it, and whenever the conditions become safe for us to work in, we will deploy our crews out to assess the damage, find where the damage is, the nature of the damage, and then start developing a plan to get the power restored as quickly and as safely as possible. Last week’s storm is, an example of this, as well as the storm in the north of that last week before. We did have about between 20 and 25 power poles that were damaged and we were able to get everybody turned back on by the next day is when we were able to get all services restored.”