Neck-deep water out in the bush made replacing power poles to restore electricity to about 450 customers in Pukatawagan a tall task for Manitoba Hydro workers July 23-25.
Power went out around 2:30 p.m. July 23 and wasn’t restored until around 11 a.m. July 25, said Riley McDonald of Manitoba Hydro media relations.
The repair crew was dispatched from Thompson and had to patrol the affected line in a helicopter to find out what was wrong.
“We don’t know what kind of kit and crew we need until we understand what happened,” McDonald said. “Once we got an idea of what and where the issue is, we had to gather supplies, scramble a crew, load everything back into the helicopter and get back to the site.”
The power outage was caused by several downed hydro poles in a swampy area where higher-than-normal amounts of rain saturated the ground and caused them to topple over.
“Water was neck-deep in the area where the poles were down,” McDonald said. “Crews struggled to do their work safely because they very nearly had to swim to the job site. One pole proved to be easier to erect than the other, because when crews pulled on the guy wire, it caught on something in the ground and allowed [the crew] to pull it back up. The other pole was floating on top of the water, so when [the crew] grabbed the guy wire to pull it up, it just pulled forward instead. Crews tried hand-drilling several more guy wires into the ground to get a better grip on the pole, but into the evening it became impossible to safely do the work and [they] had to regroup and try the next morning. Eventually the second pole came back up and [the crews] were able to re-energize the lines again.”
