Downed power lines lay on Box Springs Way NW. (Photo Courtesy Gates Guarin)

By Gates Guarin

Working around the clock

City continuing repair on electrical infrastructure damaged by storm

Jul 26, 2022 | 4:07 PM

MEDICINE HAT, AB – The City of Medicine Hat continues its massive cleanup and restoration of damage brought on by last week’s storm. The city’s electrical distribution team has been working around the clock to repair power poles and restore full power.

One of the hardest hit areas is just off of Box Springs Boulevard in the city’s northwest industrial area, where line crews have been working non-stop since the storm to replace a number of poles which were completely destroyed by the downburst.

Jeff Sandford, operations manager of electrical distribution for the city, details the aftermath on Box Springs Way.

“With the force of the winds that split a brand-new, brand-new line into many pieces, everything is laying on the ground,” Sandford says.

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Sandford adds more than 80 poles needed replacing due to the storm, and the city has had to reach out to neighbouring communities and utilities to help provide materials and supplies after initial assessments.

“As we assessed the damage, the team started putting lists together of what was needed for both make-safe and future repairs,” Sandford says. “Using those lists of materials the different individuals worked on, what would be short and then reaching out to our partners in industry who all really stepped up and provided this abundance of material we just didn’t have access to this volume at one time.”

Earlier last week Merrick Brown, director of emergency management with the city, told CHAT News while the storm wasn’t as strong as the one to hit the city five years ago, the damage is much more substantial.

“In 2017, the majority of the damage was actually what we call distribution lines, so smaller lines that are easier to fix,” Brown says. “The damage for this event would’ve been the transmission system, and those are much larger lines, carry the much heavier infrastructure, heavier electric load and so, being able to repair those is much more extensive.”

Over on Box Springs Road, line crews were present to re-string downed lines which connect two separate substations. A portion of fibre optic cable will also need to be reconnected in order to restore communications to one of the substations. Sandford describes the damage as “a twisted mess”, and estimates a fair amount of work is still needed to get the line up and running.

“This here is going to take a few days,” says Sandford. “Honestly, it depends on how everything else goes so. As- after the storm, we still have things like trees that were weakened, branches that were maybe broken, hung up, finally letting go, dropping.”

“Over the next couple of weeks, any major storm, regardless of its size, we wind up doing a lot of mop-up stuff. Plus, we have the individual customer challenges where the customer is faced with their own individual problem; the part of the service that they own is ripped down,” adds Sandford.

With round-the-clock work done by city crews, those in the community can rest easy knowing everything is being done to keep the lights on.

“The crews have been amazing. They have been working insane hours, and they’ve kept a really positive attitude, and a real can-do attitude. So I can’t express my thanks enough to these guys for what they’ve been doing to get stuff together.” Sandford says.