Power outages plague some Lamont County residents

Survival mode for over a day for some

BY JANA SEMENIUK

Power outages due to hoar frost covering and weighing down power lines, made life miserable for some Lamont County residents last week.

Posts filled social media as residents shared their woes and prayed for the power to come back on.

“Our power was out for 27 hours. Thank goodness we have a generator,” said one social media poster. “If you look at the power lines, they are heavy with frost accumulation. I feel sorry for everyone who had no power, and the Atco power workers who have been working steady at trying to find and fix all the power lines.”

The trouble began on Jan. 16 in South and Central East Alberta when the first outages were reported by ATCO electric on their twitter account. By the time all outages were resolved on Jan. 22, more than 650 outages were recorded affecting over 25,000 people.

“Unpredictable frost and fog continue to be the main source of these outages,” ATCO said on their twitter, offering another warning a few days later.

“For customers experiencing secondary outages, we ask you to initially limit power usage to critical needs once back on to avoid further outages,” they said. “The electrical grid could be over- whelmed by a surge in demand.”

St. Michael farm resident Shelley Andruchow is part of the Zawale REA power co op and also lost power to her home intermittently over a few days with the longest stretch 12 hours. She and her husband live with their daughter, son-in-law and two young grandchildren who had to find ways to occupy themselves during the blackout.

“We didn’t know what to do with ourselves,” said Andruchow. “We’re not used to no TV and no radio.”

She said she was grateful the weather was a bit warmer last week, and a wood burning stove helped.

“We have two wood burning stoves, so we weren't really affected heat wise,” she said. “I couldn't imagine if it was minus 40.”

One social media poster shared that her parents, who live near Andrew, were without power for 23 hours.

“(They were) forced to sit in the truck for hours or freeze in the dark, essentially. Been 23 hours with no heat for them,” she said, adding in a later post that their power was restored after 37 hours.

Meanwhile, Andruchow said they made do with what they had. Candles and flashlights, as well as their barbeque for cooking and their covered deck to keep refrigerator items cool.

“Kids are used to watching TV and electronical things, so (we) played games with them. I knit (and) crochet (and) do crafts. I was doing that one night and I had the flashlight right beside me and it was reflecting off the ceiling,” she said. “I (had) to do something, I can't do housework, can't do laundry can't do anything. You don't realize how much you rely on power until you do not have it”

She added that in the 25 years she has lived on her farm she cannot remember power outages lasting so long.

“There's people that had it worse than what we were, we got through it,” she said. “What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.”

Harvard womens hockey legend Emerance Maschmeyer of Bruderheim to be inducted in Beanpot Hall of Fame

BY JOHN MATHER

Bruderheim’s golden girl,

Emerance

Maschmeyer will have another accolade to add to her already impressive resume.

The hockey goalie, who won a gold medal with Canada’s Women’s Olympic team in Beijing in 2022, will be inducted into the Women’s Beanpot Hall of Fame of Harvard University.

Maschmeyer had a 5-3 record in four Beanpot tournaments during her years at the U.S. Ivy League School.

She was part of the squad in 2015 that won the Beanpot Tournament.

Her four-year stats in the Beanpot appearances is a 2.81 goals against average; and a .914 save percentage. She is the only goalie in the Beanpot to win both the MVP and the Bertagna

Award (top goalie) since the goalie award was introduced in 2000.

The induction ceremony will take place Feb. 7 when Boston College takes on Harvard at 7:30 p.m. in Boston College’s Conte Forum.

Maschmeyer currently plays for Montreal in the Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association (PWHPA).

BY JANA SEMENIUK Elk Island Public Schools Secretary

Treasurer Candace Cole presented a report at the Jan. 19 EIPS Board meeting proposing that school fees increase by five percent for the 2023/24 school year.

Cole said the parameters will be followed by individual schools as they set their fees and any fees set above the recommendation will need to be explained to the board.

She added that an inflation rate of 3.9 percent, provided by Alberta Treasury Branch, factored heavily into the increase.

“When setting fees, we do look at that consumer price index,” she said. “Alberta Treasury Branch posted (at) the very end of November (that) they were forecasting for Alberta for 2023, that inflation would come in at 3.9 percent.”

Cole said the reason the increase was set at five percent and not the 3.9 percent inflation rate was because the previous year’s increase was not enough.

A table included in the meeting package showed school fees went up by 6.2 percent last year and four percent the year before that.

While most of the fees will be capped at five percent, food courses will be capped at seven percent, due to increased food costs.

Lamont County Trustee Colleen Holowaychuk praised the report given by Cole.

“No questions, but I just really wanted to comment that I really appreciated this report both the written and the spoken report,” she said.

“It considered the balance and the considerations of both our division and family's needs (and) it was written out so well.”

Meanwhile, questions around an EIPS credit card surcharge being passed on to parents surfaced after Fort Saskatchewan Trustee Jacqueline Shotbolt brought forward a parent’s concern from her area.

“Would they (parents) be required to pay that credit card cost?” she asked.

Cole said the credit card surcharge is built into the school fees because the division has to operate at a breakeven.

When Sherwood Park Trustee Don Irwin asked Cole for clarification around the charge being built into the fees, she explained that the division will receive an extra