The city's new power outage map, showing planned outages as of Friday, August 14. (Lethbridge News Now)

By David Opinko

City of Lethbridge launches real-time power outage map

Aug 14, 2020 | 11:00 AM

LETHBRIDGE, AB – Residents of Lethbridge can now learn about power outages as they happen.

Manager of Compliance and Control Tracy Brason says the interactive map will show where a currently-active or planned outage will be, as well as information about how long it is expected to last.

“We’ve added this software to basically link up with our internal control systems that run the power grid for the City of Lethbridge. The same information the operator gets, the same information our customers are getting. This, at three o’clock in the morning, will update for an outage that’s occurring anywhere in the city.”

Similar versions of this service have been available internally for quite some time, but Brason explains that it took a lot of tweaking to make it accessible and usable for the public.

The goal is to increase real-time communications with the public.

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The service will automatically publish tweets regarding power outages to the city’s official Twitter page, @LethbridgeCity

“It’s gonna save people from wondering what’s going on or any confusion, so synchronizing the information between our operators and our field staff so they have the information, but it also makes sure our customers have the same information.”

Normally when there is a power outage, especially during the day, Brason says the city’s 311 phone line gets flooded with calls. He hopes the map will also help to alleviate the pressure on the operators.

You can learn more about power outages in Lethbridge and view the active power outage map on the city’s website through this link.