Power outage hits area

A power outage that lasted about two-and-a-half hours here yesterday evening was unforeseen, Jorge Ruppenstein of the Fort Frances Power Corp. said this morning.
“We’d like to apologize to all of the customers who were affected by this outage and thank them for their patience and understanding,” he remarked.
Since the power outage was unexpected, Ruppenstein said it took some time to determine where the problem was.
“As it turns out, we had a lightning arrester fail in our substation on our Eighth Street yard,” he noted. “Due to this failure, we lost the power supply to the entire community.”
Power outages also were seen in other parts of Rainy River District because the power is routed through the same yard at Hydro One’s side that Fort Frances is fed from.
“Due to this upset, they opened up the circuit breakers in their yard to clear the fault,” he explained.
Fort Frances Power Corp. worked with a Hydro One crew to get the problem resolved and the power back on.
“We’d like to thank the Hydro One crew for their help in this. They were good to work with,” Ruppenstein said.
He added it may have been the spring storms that caused the lightning arrester to weaken and eventually fail.
“The hardest part was locating the problem,” he noted.
“Once we pinpointed the problem, it was a matter of taking that piece of equipment, the transformer, out of service and then working with the Hydro One crew to get the power restored.”