Power outage darkens Saskatchewan REGINA (CP) - A brief but broad power failure darkened most of Saskatchewan on Saturday.

The lights went out almost everywhere acoss the province just before 6 p.m. local time, said Sask-Power spokesperson Larry Christie.

A failure at one generating station tripped outages at other stations throughout the provincial grid.

The failure left hundreds of thousands of people without electricity for about an hour before service was restored.

Traffic lights and other services were affected in urban centres and police remained on the job at the end of their shifts to deal with any emergencies.

No accidents or injuries directly related to the hydro failure were reported.

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-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), March 11, 2001

Answers

Firefighters scramble as power outage puts 20,000 Sask homes in the dark REGINA (CP) - Firefighters scrambled to rescue people trapped in elevators and families had to postpone dinner when an electrical blackout hit parts of Saskatchewan Saturday. SaskPower officials estimated that about 20,000 of the province's 260,000 residential customers may have been without power for up to 90 minutes as a result of the supper-hour blackout.

They originally feared up to one-third of their residential customers could have been affected, but discovered homes in Saskatoon and Prince Albert were not affected.

"It wasn't a total blackout like we had in 1982," said SaskPower spokesman Larry Christie. "We actually lost the entire province in 1982 for a couple of hours."

In Regina Saturday, the fire department put nearly its entire fleet of vehicles on the road responding to alarms.

"Things got pretty hectic," said a fire department dispatcher. "We ran through about 20 alarms in about half an hour.

"We had almost the whole city (fire vehicle fleet) rolling at once."

Firefighters rescued two people trapped in elevators in different parts of the city and responded to a number calls of furnace motors burning out.

Christie said the blackouts occurred when two coal-fired 300 megawatt units at its Poplar River Power Station in south central Saskatchewan, near Coronach, abruptly shut down.

He said the sudden shutdown caused another coal-fired unit at the Boundary Dam, near Estevan, Sask., to also go temporarily off line, shorting the province's 2,000 megawatt supply by 750 megawatts.

When that happened, the system began what he called "load-shedding" - blacking out areas of the province.

A back-up transmission line to Manitoba also "tripped" as a result of the heavy load preventing the utility from immediately importing power to address the demand, Christie said.

The Crown corporation operates 26 generating units in 10 power stations which produce about 3,100 megawatts of power, but it takes a while to get other plants up and running when units suddenly and unexpectedly go off line, he explained.

"We don't know what the problem was at Poplar River," he said. "We're in the process of trying to determine what went wrong."

He said one unit at Poplar River is back on line, but engineers are still trying to determine what caused the first unit to shut down.

Traffic lights and other services were affected in urban centres and police remained on the job at the end of their shifts to deal with any emergencies.

No accidents or injuries directly related to the hydro failure were reported.

Christie said the utility restored power to most residences within 90 minutes by firing up coal-fired plants and hydroelectric stations in northern parts of the province.

SaskPower hoped to have power restored to its industrial customers shortly, he said.

http://www.southam.com/ottawacitizen/newsnow/cpfs/national/010310/n031 028.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), March 11, 2001.