SaskPower is working to restore power after much of south east Saskatchewan woke up on Wednesday morning without.

According to SaskPowers Jonathan Tremblay, it started late on Tuesday morning and has affected the towns of Carlyle, Carnduff, Redvers, Alida, Gainsborough and others.

"We learned around midnight that there was an outage in the area of Carlyle and the Manitoba border, we patrolled and found one of our structures on fire," explained Tremblay. "We don't know how it happened, but the fire is out and the process is repairing our transmission structures."

"It will take some time to properly fix the damage, in the meantime we're trying to get power back on by re-routing power as much as we can. We're talking to Manitoba Hydro to see how much we can import from them and make sure we can bring people back on while they repair the damage."

"We've had about 3,500 calls to our outage center since midnight, so that indicates up to 10,000 or more customers may be without power right now. A few customers may get power as early as 10:00 a.m. and our hope is to get everyone back on by noon," Tremblay concluded.

POWER OUTAGE CONTINUES IN SOUTHEAST