REGINA -- Queen City Ribfest said it is delaying its start date after a Thursday night storm caused damage to some barbecue rigs on site.
Rob Reinhardt, organizer of Queen City Ribfest, said the wind knocked one trailer on it’s side and two others suffered some damage.
“There’s no question, one of our operations is a total write-off. The other two, there’s some functional damage, but nothing that’s going to affect our operations this week, nothing we can’t fix,” Reinhardt said.
Staff and event organizers were at Evraz place when the storm rolled in and quickly realized they needed to leave the area.
“We got our staff out of there,” said Reinhardt. “And same thing with Boss Hogs, our friends and neighbours here. They got their staff out just in time before their trailer flipped right over.”
The event, set up as a “COVID friendly” drive-thru format, was scheduled to run Friday through Sunday. Because of the storm clean up, the event will now start on Saturday.
Lightning from the storm knocked one of SaskPower’s transmission lines out of service. The line fed to substations which had about 30,000 customers on them in Regina and surrounding areas.
“Thankfully, we were able to get those customers back on by about 11:00 o’clock. And then the surrounding communities, like Emerald Park and White City, on about 3:00 o’clock this morning,” Scott McGregor, SaskPower media relations consultant, said.
McGregor said there were a number of other outages throughout the province, but crews are working to get power for all customers restored.
