Six residents on Meadowood Place in Steinbach were without power for almost three hours Wednesday night.

Bruce Owen with Manitoba Hydro says a car slid off the road and hit a pad-mount transformer (green hydro box) around 11:30 Wednesday night and the power was only restored around 2 a.m. Thursday morning. Owen adds due to the damage caused by the crash the transformer had to be replaced, which he says is an involved process.

"Some of the cabling is underground. We need to find a transformer, first of all, in our storage, truck it there, remove the transformer and then place the new one down. It's not a simple process but it's one we've done many times before."

Owen says there are several reasons for an outage including weather, trees coming down, equipment failure, wildlife, vehicle contact, and human contact.

He adds the number of outages could be reduced with a little care and forethought.

"Sometimes it's purely accidental, other times it's the operator just not taking that extra second to think, okay, have I got my boom fastened, am I driving too fast for the conditions, am I aware of my surroundings, how big is my truck or aerial sprayer when I'm turning a corner, am I going to hit that pole."

Owen says these are not regular occurrences, but frequent enough that operators and drivers need to take that extra few seconds to think before heading out on the road.