Businesses reopen after Osborne Village power outage

A day-long outage in Osborne Village on Monday left hundreds of neighbourhood residents without power and forced businesses to close.

River Avenue Safeway staff were restocking refrigerated areas on Tuesday morning. Employees had moved fresh and frozen goods Monday, storing them in refrigerated trucks to keep safe, one worker said.

The Safeway, and the nearby Liquor Mart, were among the Winnipeg businesses to temporarily shut their doors during the outage.

It began around 10:20 a.m. Monday and lasted until approximately 7 p.m., per Manitoba Hydro spokesman Peter Chura.

A distribution centre — which looks like a large green box and distributes power to the surrounding area — failed at its Donald Street location, near Wardlaw Avenue. The cause hasn’t yet been determined, Chura said.

“Corrosion due to exposure to the elements is a possibility,” he added in a statement. “In any case, it resulted in a ‘flashover,’ which burned and damaged the equipment.”

The flashover tripped safety measures at a substation and cut off power. Before the entire unit could be replaced, crews needed to attend to some 60 transformers and vaults in the area to lock or tag out equipment; it’s a safety precaution, Chura said.

Extra crews from elsewhere in the city were called to help.

“This type of failure doesn’t happen often and when it does, there is often another feeder line that load can be shifted to, to restore power to at least some customers,” Chura said. “This option was not available in this case, as both the main and backup feeder lines were affected by the equipment failure.”

Partial restoration would’ve introduced unnecessary safety issues, Chura said, so Manitoba Hydro decided to restore both feeders concurrently.

Hydro reported 986 customers were affected.

— Free Press staff