Shortly after midnight Friday approximately 3,200 Manitoba Hydro customers lost power.  

According to a statement from Manitoba Hydro, "The cause of the outage was a pole fire on a line that serves two substations, one in Winkler and the second in the Hochfeld area." 

Winkler Fire Department received the call at approximately 11:30 pm for a hydro pole fire on Hwy 201 and Rd 26W, according to Fire Chief Richard Paetzold. 

Paetzold said in a statement, "Crews blocked the road for safety reasons till hydro was on scene." 

A widespread area from Hwy 13 to the USA border had outages, as reported on the Manitoba Hydro Outages webpage.  

Hydro crews restored power to customers in Winkler at 1:13 a.m. and in the Hochfeld area at 4:10 a.m. 

Manitoba Hydro also said, "Pole fires are a common cause of electrical outages in Manitoba and usually caused by dense fog or light snow or rain combining with a hairline crack on a piece of electrical equipment, causing a short circuit and fire. Depending on the damage caused by a pole fire, some outages can last several hours as the entire pole must be replaced." 

As these kinds of outages can happen at any time, Manitoba Hydro encourages all our customers to be prepared for an extended outage by putting together an accessible emergency kit.

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