The colder weather and the snow is significantly helping contain the Cloverdale wildfire near Prince Albert and while work to extinguish the fire continues, a drone has also been brought in to do thermal scanning for hot spots.

That from the Saskatchewan Public Safety Agency’s Vice-President of Operations, Steve Roberts, who says the drone will cover the over 55-hundred hectares tonight (Fri) or tomorrow night.

Normally hot spots can be found by the smoke, but when the temperature is colder, they aren’t hot enough to produce smoke, so this way the drone can find them.

Since the fire began, 59 evacuees registered for support, but they have all headed home.

It’s not known yet where the origin of the wildfire is or the cause, but investigators are working on that and a complete report will be ready in a few weeks.

Joel Cherry with SaskPower says the power was back on around 9 last night for about 8,000 customers from the Prince Albert area to as far north as Grandmother’s Bay.

However, the power went out again almost immediately in both Stanley Mission and Grandmother’s Bay.

Cherry expects it’s because these communities rely on electricity for heat, so it may have overloaded the system, but power was restored by somewhere between 1 and 2 a.m.

The reason for the large swath of outages is because the customers are all served from one main line.

There are three wildfires burning in Saskatchewan right now.

The Cloverdale fire near Prince Albert is considered contained, and it’s the largest.

Prince Albert and area is still under an air quality advisory as of late Friday afternoon.

The other two are the Division fire in the Fort a la Corne area and the McBride fire south of Hudson Bay, and neither are contained.

{CJWW}