Today's hours-long power outage affecting much of Lac La Biche County was caused by an errant raven landing in the wrong place at a local electrical substation. Rolling blackouts will continue throughout the region until mid-afternoon March 10, when initial repair work is expected to be completed.
UPDATE: Rolling blackouts will continue until mid-afternoon March 10, when initial repair work is expected to be completed. When power is restored mid-afternoon, all 2,800 customers who were affected by the initial outage will experience a momentary loss of power.
Today's hours-long power outage affecting much of Lac La Biche County was caused by an errant raven landing in the wrong place at a local electrical substation.
According to Peter Brodsky, a spokesperson for the power transmission company Altalink, the bird found its way into the company's Lac La Biche substation this morning and landed on a transformer.
"The bird spread out its wings, contacted two parts of the transformer and created a flashover," Brodsky said. "Unfortunately, the bird is dead, and the transformer was knocked out."
The substation is located approximately 3 km south of the hamlet of Lac La Biche along Highway 36.
The incident caused electrical blackouts throughout the Lac La Biche region at about 10:20 a.m., affecting communities from Lac La Biche to Hylo, Beaver Lake to Heart Lake. According to FortisAlberta spokesperson Jennifer MacGowan, about 2,800 customers were affected.
By mid-afternoon, some of the electrical load from the broken Altalink transformer was re-routed to Altalink's substation in Plamondon, but that equipment was not able to carry as heavy a load and power could not be restored to all areas.
MacGowan said about 1,800 customers had their power restored by noon, and another 400 were restored by 2:25. By 4:30, the number of customers was down to 280.
But by that time, the power load was too heavy for Fortis' distribution network out of the Plamondon substation and they were forced to implement rolling blackouts. MacGowan said the rolling blackouts will affect about 1,000 customers, and will go in cycles of one hour on, two hours off.
"We were making really good progress, but then our system was overloaded and that's when we had to take those rotating power outages," said MacGowan.
The rolling blackouts are expected to continue until mid-afternoon March 10, when Altalink is able to bypass the broken transformer by connecting a mobile substation to the power grid at the Lac La Biche substation.
While AltaLink initially expected to be able to restore all power and stop rolling blackouts by the morning of March 10, the expected time was later pushed back to mid-afternoon March 10. Brodsky said AltaLink crews had finished connecting the mobile substation by midday March 10, but testing still needed to be completed before it could be turned on.
The mobile substation will remain in place until Altalink can repair the broken transformer. Brodsky said they don't yet know how long this will take.
The hours-long power outage caused temporary interruptions in water service to some areas of Lac La Biche County, according to county spokesperson Julie MacIsaac.
"With the power outage, it was necessary to run a bypass from the main reservoir to outlying reservoirs in order to maintain pressure," said MacIsaac. "This was the cause for any temporary loss of service."
Lac La Biche Provincial Court was in session during the outage, and proceedings continued - albeit in the half-dark, using emergency lighting. The outage caused the Bold Center to shut down temporarily. William J. Cadzow Healthcare Centre switched to generator power, which was only provided to essential equipment.
Brodsky said Altalink has insulated shielding on most of the equipment at the Lac La Biche substation in order to protect it during contact with wildlife, but it doesn't protect the equipment completely.
"For the most part, it's not sensitive to bird contact, but this is one bird that managed to find a way to circumvent that portion," Brodsky said. "Through no fault of its own, of course."
With files from Alex Fuller, Luke Muise and Rob McKinley.
This story has been updated multiple times as the story progressed to add new information.
An earlier version of this story said that power was rerouted from Altalink's equipment at the Lac La Biche substation to FortisAlberta's equipment at the same substation. Altalink spokesperson Peter Brodsky later clarified that power was actually rerouted through Altalink's Plamondon substation. We apologize for the error.
