Moose Jaw residents in the northwest part of the city were without power for several hours on Thursday night into Friday morning.  

SaskPower issued a statement on Thursday at around 9:52 p.m. saying that crews were working to repair some damage, and it wasn’t until about 3:30 a.m. on Friday that the power was restored.  

Scott McGregor, a spokesperson for SaskPower says the culprit was a pole fire, which sparked the power outage.

He notes that these types of power outages are more common in the springtime.  

“Over the course of the winter you have dust, sand, dirt, salt, and all that grime that you see on everything once the snow melts, well that also ends up on the top of power poles and powerlines,” says McGregor. 

“In the springtime when you have a light drizzle or rain, what that does is create a connection between the electrified conductor and the pole itself, which creates an arch and then starts the pole on fire,” adds McGregor.  

A pole fire isn’t typically seen by the naked eye because most of the time it mainly smolders but does cause enough damage to interrupt the connection or trips the system.  

“What happens to remedy that is we typically do some switching, which diverts power from other places around where the fault is. We strung a new conductor and we put a new pole down. There are a lot of different ways depending on where and the circumstances of the outage.” 

McGregor wanted to say thank you to Moose Jaw’s patience throughout the power outage, as it may have inconvenienced some residents.