The Thanksgiving storm last fall made a significant impact on more than just the town. RCMP detachments were affected.

Inspector Jarrid St. Pierre outlines some important aspects of their work that the storm inadvertently informed them about that require improvement. He shared his findings to the RM of Portage la Prairie Council on this past Tuesday.

"Some of the gaps that we observed were just some communication with some of the partnering agencies that we have, and more, that we need to enhance, as well as generators," explains St. Pierre. "I think everyone in the community realizes that having these generators is a good idea. And in some of the detachments in Amaranth and Treherne, we also identified some gaps there."

He notes the local detachment communicated with the director of Public Safety about the need to enhance the power at the station. St. Pierre says he's aware that many stress issues are also involved with city infrastructure. He adds the city will appropriately determine where they fit on the priority list.

"Overall, things went well," continues St. Pierre. "We had a number of collisions, of course, reported as a result of the storm. We'd like to remind the public that, when they see workers, especially the hydro workers that were coming through, to slow their speeds down. That was a number of concerns we had received from hydro -- people were driving way too fast past their scenes."

He says speeding past the workers on the scene caused a lot of anxiety for them, noting that these people were working longer than their usual hours to restore our power.

St. Pierre adds they did some traffic control for the hydro workers and responded to calls as much as they were able to, noting that there was not much they could do with highways closed.