A day after energy providers enacted rolling blackouts throughout the province, in an attempt to cut power usage – city officials are wondering why there was no warning.
In Edmonton, EPCOR rotated hour-long blackouts through areas in the city – after the Alberta Energy System Operator (AESO) put out the call to Albertans to cut their power usage.
AESO said in a press release, sent out Tuesday, six generating stations went down on Monday –that coupled with extreme heat caused a spike in power usage, which brought on the emergency move.
The operator also said on Monday, Albertans set an all-time record for power use - breaking the previous record which was set in July 2011.
However, City officials and police said they were not warned the blackouts were to be enacted.
“It’s unacceptable,” Mayor Stephen Mandel said. “We’ll have to find out what happened and what went wrong.”
“Certainly, there could’ve been much better communication from EPCOR to our administration,” Councillor Tony Caterina said.
Tim LeRiche, a spokesperson with EPCOR, said what happened on Monday was unusual, and the company is looking into how it was handled.
“Whenever situations like this happen, we always sit down and debrief and ask ourselves if there’s something we couldn’t do better,” LeRiche said. “And if there is, we’ll do it.”
The city said if their officials had been notified, they would have taken measures to warn the public to ensure Edmontonians were ready to handle blacked out intersections.
“Of course it’s a safety issue,” Mandel said. “I mean, traffic lights without any controls are a problem.”
Approximately forty intersections were affected by the blackouts Monday.
Edmonton police said officers were sent to direct traffic after the blackouts started, but CTV News has learned there were not enough officers to keep up with the blackouts.
The mayor said he’s working with city administration and EPCOR officials, to find out what went wrong.
He said he hopes to hear from officials Wednesday.
With files from Bill Fortier
