A storm in the southeast last night caused some SaskPower customers in the North Portal area to lose power this morning, but not directly. SaskPower had to briefly switch the power off this morning to trim some trees and prevent a more serious outage in the future. 

The storm last night pushed some tree branches to within dangerous distance of nearby power lines. Because trees getting entangled can cause power outages and even fires, SaskPower had to send someone out to trim the trees, and to safely do that they had to shut off the power temporarily. 

"Currently we have a planned outage happening in North Portal due to some unforeseen work we had to do there for some tree trimming," said SaskPower media relations and issues management consultant Joel Cherry. "About 11 customers are off right now. We had to get in there and turn the power off to make sure we could do the tree trimming safely."

SaskPower hopes to have everyone's power back online before noon today, and they thanked customers for their patience. The planned outage was a last-minute thing, but storms do have a way of messing with otherwise perfectly functional power lines. 

"We had a number of outages throughout the province," Cherry explained, "most significantly in the southwest and south-central part of the province but as far afield as the Saskatoon area and certainly in southeast Saskatchewan we did see some severe weather as well. About a third of all of our outages are caused by severe weather, whether that's directly or indirectly."

Cherry added that trees coming into contact with power lines can conduct electricity and increase the chances of electric shocks as well as fires. He said they frequently trim trees growing anywhere near power lines to prevent more serious outages and disasters.