Power is back on for about 42,000 Nova Scotia Power customers in Halifax, Saturday, after an outage Friday night that happened during a heatwave.
When power failed, temperatures were soaring in Nova Scotia to about 36 degrees with humidity.
The entire outage included areas such as Timberlea, Bedford, Beechville, Herringcove, Sambro and Hatchet Lake.
The fire started around 8 p.m., according to On-Duty District Chief Steve Bussey with Halifax Regional Fire and Emergency.
He says the fire was contained to one of the transformers at the Lakeside substation.
When crews got to the scene, they waited for NS Power to deactivate the power at the site so they could get in without being shocked.
They had the fire out by around 9:30 p.m., he says. No injuries were reported.
The current transformers have oil in them, which measures the power in the substation. That oil caused the small fire, according to a spokesperson with Nova Scotia Power.
The fire department also had to help several people stuck in elevators when that power went out. They say they got at least six calls about people trapped.
Bussey says they were all released, however, and no one was hurt.
In a statement on social media around 10 p.m., Nova Scotia Power apologized for the power interruption acknowledging the impact.
“We are so sorry you are without power on this hot Friday evening. We know how frustrating this is and our crews are working safely and as fast as possible to get your lights and AC back on,” said the statement.
The utility had originally stated that one of the outages was due to salt contamination but that was a mix up and said they want to “clear up some confusion.”
In addition to that, Nova Scotia Power said they had been asked if the issue was due to grid load.
“Many of you have reached out to ask if this is a ‘load shedding’ event caused by from high demand from air conditioners,” said the statement.
Load shedding is a last resort measure when electricity demand becomes higher than the grid can safely supply. Power is then turned off briefly to different parts of the province to rotate demand and prevent a province-wide system failure.
The utility said that was not the case Friday night.
–With files from Evan Taylor
