BARRHEAD - Just before 8 am this morning the town of Barrhead and surrounding areas including Thunder Lake, Minolta, Neerlandia and parts of Barrhead County had a power outage.
Morgan Giacobbo, a customer service representative with Fortis said,"The first outage was reported at 7:57 am and was caused by a motor vehicle accident that ripped down some of the overhead lines."
The Fortis website showed 2,000 customers were affected by the outage.
Internet access, cell service was interrupted or lessened and traffic lights were out.
Schools, businesses and residents were brought to a stop.
Drivers resorted to stopping at intersections and taking turns to proceed.
At 9:25 a.m. there was partial restoration of power.
The Fortis outage map showed that the affected customer count dropped to between 500 to 2000.
The traffic lights came on but buildings were still dark.
There was no internet access in the centre of town, but this reporter could get a partial signal at the north end of town.
Service was restored just before 10:34 am.
"There looks like there is another outage happening around that area again but we (Fortis) don't have a cause for that at the moment,"Giacobbo commented.
The 10:38 am update from The Fortis outage recording was "We (Fortis) are experiencing electrical outages in the following areas; in the County of Thorhild and Westlock County and estimated time of restoration for 12:30 pm. We are also experiencing outages in Barrhead, the County of Barrhead and Westlock County, all with a restoration estimate of 1:30 pm."
