Power went out in middle of the night

By Brian Konrad

Overnight outage impacts city and rural customers

More than 16,500 customers lose power overnight in city

Apr 5, 2022 | 11:21 AM

MEDICINE HAT, AB — It’s believed to be one of the largest power outages in the history of Medicine Hat, even larger than the outage from the wind storm in October 2017.

Director of city operations Grayson Mauch says almost 16,500 customers were impacted when a series of built-in protections tripped around 1 a.m.

“They were operating as they were designed to do, to protect the system and to protect the safety of the public,” says Mauch.

It all culminated with a large portion of the transmission system going offline due to the same type of automated protections.

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Mauch says people may have seen arcing as these systems went off, but so far, they’ve not found any indication of damage to transformers or other infrastructure.

Crews were able to restore service to a vast majority of customers by around 6 a.m. Tuesday.

There may be periodic outages in the city to allow crews to safely inspect and repair the infrastructure.

The weather was also to blame for numerous outages in rural areas of southeastern Alberta.

Tanya Croft with Fortis Alberta says customers can keep track of repairs by using an app on their website, service.fortisalberta.com/

Croft says additional crews were being brought in from other parts of Alberta, but they were being hampered by the wind and road conditions.

As with city utility crews, Fortis says safety of its works crews remains a top priority as they work to restore full service.