Hydro crews working on lines south of Steinbach Thursday

Friday - 1:45 p.m.:

Power is slowly being restored to residents living in the Rural Municipality of La Broquerie. Hydro lines have sustained heavy damage from wet snow and strong winds. Reeve Claude Lussier says the town of La Broquerie has power again. He notes Marchand is the last densely populated area of the municipality needing to have its electricity restored. Lussier says residents of the municipality without hydro are invited to the Marchand Hotel this evening for free meals. Lussier anticipates by this evening, 95% of residents in the RM of La Broquerie will have power again.

Meanwhile, according to the Government of Canada, a fridge without power left closed will keep items cold for four to six hours, while a freezer will keep items frozen for 24 to 48 hours.

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Friday - 11:25 a.m.:

Manitoba Hydro expects it will be sometime into the weekend before service is fully restored in parts of southeastern Manitoba. Lines have sustained heavy damage from wet snow and strong winds.

Public Relations Manager Glenn Schneider says, "It looks like, in particular, a couple of areas, we're going to be working on through the weekend. The main areas where we had the worst damage is around Piney. We lost over 100 poles around that community due to heavy icing. The second area is in the Whiteshell and primarily Falcon Lake and Westhawk."

Schneider adds they hope to have service restored in the La Broquerie-Marchand area sometime Friday afternoon. He says, " We have Beausejour out right now as well and that's due to a transmission problem that we hope we can get resolved and the same thing with La Broquerie and that vicinity. But some of the area where we have a tremendous amount of work to do and we have real access problems in the Whiteshell and around Piney it's going to extend into the weekend and I wouldn't hazard (a guess as to) even a day when we can get them back on."

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Many people in the southeast have been without electricity since noon Thursday.

Scott Powell of Manitoba Hydro says as of 6:00 this morning, "We still have widespread outages in the southeast ranging from Piney back towards Vita, St. Pierre, through the Whiteshell, Pointe du Bois, Bird Lake, Falcon Lake, Hadashville, West Hawk Lake areas. We have widespread damage too, not just to our feeder lines, but individual distribution lines throughout the southeast. Crews were working on that all day yesterday. Just yesterday we had to replace 45 poles and I know that in the Piney district alone they are going to have to replace over 125 poles today." He adds there are more poles damaged elsewhere throughout the southeast.

Powell says all the damage is weather related with up to to three inches of ice on lines in places.

He has this message to people who are without electricity. "All of our available resources, field crews are heading into the area. We have extra crews coming in from the Interlake, Brandon, Winnipeg, construction crews, line maintenance crews, pole crews, so we're putting our maximum available resources into the area to assist our local staff with restoration efforts." He notes they are being hampered by poor road conditions in the Falcon Lake-West Hawk Lake area which is making it hard for crews to do their work.

Powell asks people to be patient as they are doing their best to get this situation resolved.