SaskEnergy still restoring gas to evacuated communities

A man patrols the evacuated village of Montreal Lake, Sask. in this Thursday, July 9, 2015 file photo. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh)

SaskEnergy is dealing with the largest service outage in the company’s history as many wildfire evacuees return home this weekend.

“With natural gas, you can’t just flip a switch and have it back on,” said Dave Burdeniuk, a spokesperson for the Crown corporation.

The company is working to restore service to 1,400 customers — most in the Montreal Lake and Lac La Ronge areas.

The gas, which was shut off weeks ago because of threatening wildfires, must be restored at each home individually. Technicians can’t turn the gas back on until evacuees are in their homes.

“When the evacuation first happened, we weren’t able to go door to door and shut off everyone’s services, so what we did is we just shut off stations in the region and then vented gas out of the system,” Burdeniuk said.

“Last weekend we were able to get technicians back into the area and physically shut off the stopcock at everyone’s meter.”

Burdeniuk said restoring gas to all homes at once would be too risky — especially for those homes whose residents have yet to return. Technicians must go door to door.

“We just can’t take the chance with natural gas,” he said. “It is odorized gas but, if nobody’s home, no one is there to smell that something is wrong.”

SaskEnergy crews, as of Saturday morning, were still restoring service to 50 of 282 customers in Montreal Lake. Only 200 of the 1,100 La Ronge area customers had had their gas restored.

“We do expect those numbers to dramatically increase throughout the day,” Burdeniuk said.

He couldn’t estimate when all services would be restored, but said the process takes about 10 minutes per household.