A significant portion of Southern Manitoba went dark at 8:15 Thursday morning after a dump truck mistakenly came into contact with a power-line while dumping back-fill near Rosa.

“During the height of the outage we had 4,500 customers without power,” indicates Bruce Owen, a Spokesperson for Manitoba Hydro.

According to Owen, communities including Vita, Sprague, St. Pierre, St. Malo, Ste. Elizabeth, Stuartburn, and Roseau River First Nation were without power for up to four and a half hours.

Still, Owen explains that the hydro system is designed to work around problems like this momentarily defective power-line. “We were able to switch onto alternate lines and restore some places sooner rather than later.” St. Pierre, for example, had power return around roughly 11:00 AM.

Owen says power was fully restored to all customers around Manitoba by 12:32 PM.