Tuesday's power outages in Saskatoon unrelated to last week's: city utility
Computer that caused Tuesday's outages in process of being replaced
Saskatoon Light & Power (SL&P) says two separate power outages in the city on Tuesday were unrelated to the issue that caused an outage last week.
In a news release, the utility said the mid-afternoon outages affected customers in various areas of the city.
According to SL&P, the first outage at 3:10 p.m. CST affected east-central neighbourhoods — including Holliston, Adelaide Churchill, Haultain, Greystone Heights, Varsity View, Brevoort Park, Eastview and Nutana Park — and lasted six minutes.
The second event, which it said started at 3:22 p.m. CST and lasted 17 minutes, impacted about 35,000 customers across most of the west, north and east regions serviced by the utility.
According to Environment and Climate Change Canada, the temperature in the city at the time of the outages was -18 C. The wind chill made conditions outside feel closer to -28 C.
SL&P said the outages were caused by the failure of a computer called a remote terminal unit, which enables remote operation at the Taylor Street Substation.
When the computer failed, it caused a switch to open, leading to the outages, SL&P said.
The failed unit has been disconnected to prevent further disruptions, and its replacement "is being prioritized for the coming weeks," the utility said.
SL&P said Tuesday's outages were unrelated to last week's, in which large sections of the city lost power for just under three hours.
Those issues were caused by a mechanical failure of a switch at a different substation and these two incidents "appear to be an unfortunate coincidence," it said.
The utility said equipment failures can happen from frequent use and exposure to the environment and "it prides itself on maintaining one of Canada's best reliability scores among electricity providers."