(File photo/ paNOW Staff)

By Nick Nielsen

SaskPower still working to fix storm and wildfire damages

Aug 24, 2025 | 5:30 PM

With the storms that have rolled through Saskatchewan over the past two weeks, you may have noticed that SaskPower’s page on X, formerly known as Twitter, is a lot busier than just dealing with a number of power outages due to the weather. SaskPower has been posting about a ton of ‘planned power outages’ in that time, and that’s because they are looking to build up some of their infrastructure to prepare themselves better for the future.

Scott McGregor is a spokesperson for SaskPower, and he shared why you may have been seeing those reports so often lately.

“So whenever we have a planned outage, there could be any number of reasons for that. It could be that we’re going and upgrading a transformer to increase the reliability to the area. We could be replacing some power poles that are just at the end of their life and they’re scheduled to be replaced. It could be that a pole had been damaged, but it’s not damaged enough to require an immediate fix, were able to just reinforce it, make it safe, and then we would come back maybe later in the year or the following year to replace that pole. There’s all sorts of different reasons for those.”

Another reason you could see scheduled planned power outages would be for line reroutes. This can happen when a more direct or accessible route is created to allow SaskPower workers to better service the line, or to remove power lines from old farmyards and businesses that no longer use them.

McGregor isn’t aware of any major rerouting projects that are scheduled now, but for anyone curious there is an easy way to stay up to date.

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“Any sort of reinforcement work to our power system would be all on our website, saskpower.com/projects. That’ll have a pretty big list of any sort of major line work that we will be doing. It usually is just new construction that we would have on there, power lines, but if there is a substantial rerouting of lines or a moving of lines, that might make its way onto that page as well.”

It was reported earlier that SaskPower was going to have over 300 power poles to replace in the north due to the wildfires that ravaged most of northern Saskatchewan earlier this year, but while that does sound like a lot, it isn’t a totally unexpected expense. While it’s nearly impossible to budget for how much equipment needs replacing every year, they already had a stock of new power poles ready to be put up this year.

“It changes every year, like one year we might not have any wildfires, we might have wildfires but none that would necessarily impact our equipment. If it’s burning out between where our lines are running, then obviously we don’t have to worry about that as much other years. It might be in the winter time that we see the largest amount of equipment damage from storms, so it’s really hard to put a specific number on what we are planning for the following year, but that said, we do plan for these contingencies and have the extra material on hand.”

Saskatchewan has seen two major storms roll through over the course of the last two weeks, and that has lead to some delays in repairing the damaged infrastructure as well.

“Last week’s storm, as well as the one that that rolled through around the PA area, Candle Lake, and Shellbrook area the week before, whenever a really powerful storm rolls through, there’s a chance that our infrastructure may be impacted by it, and whenever the conditions become safe for us to work in, we will deploy our crews out to assess the damage, find where the damage is, the nature of the damage, and then start developing a plan to get the power restored as quickly and as safely as possible. Last week’s storm is, an example of this, as well as the storm in the north of that last week before. We did have about between 20 and 25 power poles that were damaged and we were able to get everybody turned back on by the next day is when we were able to get all services restored.”