A total of 280 SaskPower customers on the Hatchet Lake First Nation were without power for nearly a day.
The outage began late Sunday afternoon and was only resolved by SaskPower workers early yesterday afternoon — 21 hours later.
Reserve residents were concerned that such a lengthy power outage took place in the middle of winter when temperatures dipped to -30 degrees Celsius.
SaskPower spokesperson Tyler Hopson says the remoteness of the outage made it difficult for workers to find the problem area.
“It’s best for them to work in daytime,” said Hopson. “They dispatched a crew first thing on Monday and a helicopter and did some patrolling to find the problem, but because of that remoteness it resulted in a longer than normal outage.”
Hopson says, in this case, they didn’t know the exact location of the outage, so working through the night would have been ineffective.
“Looking at night in a forested or treed area would present a number of problems and challenges, whereas doing it by daylight is a more effective way to get that work done.”
Hopson says SaskPower tries to get outages fixed as quickly as possible, but they can run into unforeseen problems.