Redcliff residents spend the night without power
Redcliff’s electricity was restored by 2:30 p.m. Wednesday after Tuesday night’s intense wind storm that swept across southern Alberta.
The town’s northwest and south areas, where the majority of its inhabitants reside, were without power on Tuesday evening, as well as the morning and early afternoon on Wednesday.
Kim Dalton, Redcliff’s director of emergency management, said the power went out around 6 p.m. Tuesday.
“It was unexpected,” said Dalton. “It’s affected some of our critical infrastructure, so our water treatment plant is running on backup generation and some lift stations.
“We’re doing an assessment on our current facilities. We have shingles missing (and) some damage at the arena — an exhaust hood fan for the kitchen blew off the roof.
“On the south end of town ... those homes have received some quite extensive damage. There’s some roofs gone, shingles and siding.
“Those areas that are more exposed to wind have seen more damage.”
Dalton said it’s fortunate the outages didn’t occur in the dead of winter.
“Because of where we live in southern Alberta, this isn’t new to us, having wind and having power outages caused by wind.
“But on the flipside, it’s good that this happened when it’s warm outside and we haven’t faced issues of dealing with the cold weather climate,” he said.
Residents respond
Maureen Bechtold cleaned her yard with her husband Reuben and son David after one of their trees got caught on a power line and was cut down.
“We decided to do our own cleanup because we wanted to open up our back alley and we weren’t sure if the city was going to help us, so we did it on our own,” she said, adding they noticed the tree fall around 10 p.m. on Tuesday.
The City of Medicine Hat, which is responsible for administering Redcliff’s power, came to cut the tree off the powerline but Maureen said she didn’t know whether the city would return to dispose of it.
“I know they’re very busy right now,” she said.
Mike Wells, who was at the local Home Hardware purchasing a lantern, echoed Dalton’s sentiment about the weather.
“Of course, we had no heat,” he said. “It’s a good thing it wasn’t that cold yet.”
Wells applauded the way the town handles its water distribution in case of emergency.
“The good thing about the (Town) of Redcliff is they keep the water pressure up, so we had water, not hot but it was water,” he said.
He didn’t have much damage at his house — only losing a birdfeeder — but some of his neighbours weren’t as lucky.
Parts of his house have no windows, which is why he ventured out to purchase a lamp.
“It’s pretty dark in there,” Wells said.