Last night’s (August 2nd) quick thunderstorm left thousands of Airdrie residents in the dark after the power went out following a lightning strike.

“It was 9:09 last night that we had 11,671 customers in west Airdrie out,” says Kevin Haslbeck with Fortis Alberta.

Haslebeck believes that the outage was caused after lightning hit a power box in the area.

Thankfully, many customers didn’t have to stay in the dark for long.

“As soon as the power went out, automatically the system restored just under 5,000 of the customers within seconds just by switching to other feeders. By 10:30, the crew had identified the device that had potentially been struck by lightning. They made the necessary repairs and got the rest of the customers back up. It was all within an hour and a half.”

According to the Fortis Map below, the majority of customers affected were around 8th Street, 1st Avenue and 24th Street.

(Courtesy: Fortis Alberta)

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