"In the history utilities in Manitoba, it was the biggest outage ever experienced."

That's the word from Media Relations Officer at Manitoba Hydro Bruce Owen about the Thanksgiving storm in Portage last year.

The stars and heroes of last year's Thanksgiving storm crisis were the Hydro workers, hands-down. Do you remember all the signs people placed in windows, thanking these people?

pole lines, down. Roughly 4000 poles were broken or damaged that had to be replaced. And particularly in the Portage area North of you and more into the Interlake, we had 300 transmission towers that were damaged."

"We had more than 160,000 customers who lost power -- some more than once -- during this time period. Some were out for as long as two weeks. And, to put that in perspective, our customer-base is 593 customers. So, roughly a third of customers lost power at one point or the other."

He explains they're still working on some wiring today as a result of that storm. The east end of Crescent Lake has replacement towers, after the original ones buckled, that still have yet to be connected. They're a part of the secondary power for Portage, should something knock out our primary source of electricity.

"Yeah, we're working on that now," adds Owen. "It had to be realigned. One of the things that we're looking that at we did... we did a "lessons learned look-back." If something like this was to repeat itself -- cross your fingers; no, not this Thanksgiving. -- that we will be a little bit better prepared to address it. One of the lessons learned, for instance, involves resiliency of our grid; why did some towers buckle, particularly North of you and into the Interlake? The way the wind acted during this storm, Lake Manitoba at the narrows almost became a wind tunnel, and towers there buckled and crumbled. Many of them have been replaced, and we're now a little south of you and west of you, where we're doing a little bit more work rebuilding a line."

Owen adds their look-back at how the storm fared, along with how their electrical system reacted, while keeping in mind where key elements are located, is all that's considered when working toward more resiliency to their system. He notes this is done in order to not experience what they did a year ago. He outlines what that involves.

Trees down in the RM of Portage

"And this could be tower design; it can be where it's located and, essentially, add, not only resiliency to the system so people won't lose as many people always power it, but it also adds, what we call, redundancy. If one section of the system is to go out, another system is there to switch to," continues Owen.

The overall cost that is continuing until this day is expected to be $100 million. Owen adds the work should be done in a couple of months.

EF Moon helping out with feeding hydro workers

"I think what we've learned from this is -- and I don't want to sound like I'm bragging or anything like that, but we did a lot of things right -- one of the benefits, if there's a silver lining to any of this, is that we had at least three-days notice that this storm was coming," notes Owen. "And we had an inkling as to how it would behave. So, any work we were doing on that Monday when the forecast came in for that Thanksgiving weekend, we started sending people home and cancelling some maintenance work so people would be rested up. And we were also starting to look at our stores and suppliers as to what we would need. We didn't expect that we would have approximately 4000 poles damaged. We don't have 4000 Poles sitting at a yard somewhere. So, we had to work our supply chain almost 24/7 for two weeks to get the equipment we needed."

Owen says they're now looking at how they can work with their suppliers so they'll know almost instantly where the supplies are needed if this happens again.

"During last year's storm we had to work the phones a lot," adds Owen. "We don't want to work the phones as much next time. We want those pieces that we need for our system to fix it. We want to be able to access them a lot more quickly."

Video footage courtesy of MB Hydro: