2,000 meters inspected, 40% in need of repair
SaskPower says the run of electrical fires caused by meters “isn’t something we regularly keep a lookout for.”
Hot and dry conditions are causing ground shifting in the Regina area, which in turn is pulling wiring out from power meter boxes and starting fires — six of them in the past two weeks.
But SaskPower did not start mitigating against the risk of those fires until after the first house was damaged.
“When we saw the first one, it was very unusual,” said SaskPower spokesman Jonathan Tremblay, adding shifting is sometimes seen but a fire is “very rare.”
About 2,000 homes have since been inspected in the particularly high-risk areas of Glencairn, Uplands and Normanview. Around 800 homes — or 40 per cent of those inspected — were in need of repair because they had signs of damage.
“It’s extremely rare for this to happen, so it’s really not something that regularly our crews are looking out for. We had to pull them off their regular work to start doing that,” Tremblay said.
This has been the driest year in the area since 1887, with Environment Canada recorded only 1.8 millimetres of July rain in Regina.
Despite two of every five inspected meters being at risk of starting a fire, Tremblay says there are no plans right now for SaskPower to remove the at-risk power meter boxes.
“The problem is, it’s not the boxes as much as it is the wires being pulled out and there is no easy fix for that,” he said, noting houses built in the 1960s and ’70s are at the highest risk because the power boxes likely have copper wiring that will continue to conduct electricity even if it has pulled out of the box.
Inspections will continue — Tremblay says “we have no end date” — in high-risk areas and are being expanded to include other areas around Regina, including Moose Jaw.
People are encouraged to check their own power meters, looking for meter boxes that are tilting, frayed wires poking out the bottom of the box or a big gap between the ground and the house.
According to Tremblay, individual repair costs can reach “up to $2,000 in the most extreme cases where we have to replace everything and do detailed repairs.”
That was the most detailed information on the costs of the power meter fires provided by the Crown. If each of the 800 repairs that have already taken place cost $2,000, the total for SaskPower would be $1.6 million.
SaskPower has already committed to handling the repairs at no cost to homeowners.