Residents in the Bean Crescent and 17th Street east Weyburn area today got their power back after it had suddenly gone out 17 hours before, yesterday afternoon.

This was due to an outage on an underground power cable line. 

Joel Cherry, a Spokesperson for SaskPower, said it wasn't posted online due to only affecting 39 of their customers. 

"Underground outages do happen. They're not vulnerable to the elements, the same way with overhead lines are, so we don't have issues with wildlife or weather with underground lines, but they do sometimes fail, sometimes as a result of aging equipment." 

He said they are currently replacing underground cables and duct banks in a couple of different parts of the province.

"Underground outages are not as common, but they do tend to take longer to fix, because overhead infrastructure, you go up in a bucket or climb the pole and they can fix it right there," Cherry explained. "It's harder to both find the cause of the outage and to replace it when it's underground, so that was what was happening there." 

In all, the outage lasted 17 hours, 20 minutes, and was likely reported within minutes of suddenly occurring, and the repairs were able to be completed once the power was restored. 

"What happens in the case of an outage like that, customers would have called into our center and talked to them directly."

"In Regina here, we had an outage a couple of weeks ago where we had 5,000 customers off for about 5 to 7 hours, so it's never convenient when the power goes out and we always appreciate our customers' patience while we get the power back on as quickly as we can."