SaskPower Crews were on the scene early Tuesday morning dealing with outages following the blizzard that ripped through the southeast Monday night.

Thanks to high winds gusting up to 99 km/h created whiteout conditions and power outages, residents of Halbrite and Mainprize Lake were without power until the next morning.

Spokesperson with SaskPower, Joel Cherry, said rural areas tend to have more extended outages, especially when crews have the conditions to contend with while they work.

"We get out there as soon as we can to restore power, but we need to make sure we can do so safely. The challenge we experienced overnight, particularly late yesterday, was whiteout conditions. It's difficult to respond to the outage."

"We want to restore the power as quickly as possible, but we have to do it in a way that's safe for our crews. Travel can be hazardous when we have low visibility and can be also dangerous in some cases when there are high winds for crews to work in bucket trucks if they need to do so," he noted.

Those crews normally respond by prioritizing the number of people affected by the outages, so those outages in rural areas may not be on the top of the list.

Cherry shared a few safety tips for anyone who gets caught in an outage.

"When a customer experiences an outage we encourage you to call it into SaskPower at 310-2220 to tell us what happened. We're beginning to roll out Smart Meters now, but for the time being, we're still relying on our customers to tell us when outages occur."

He also shared that people should be prepared with an emergency outage kit, and never go near a downed power line if strong winds end up blowing those down.