Throughout the last couple of days Moose Jaw and surrounding area residents have been no stranger to power outages. However, Tuesday's outage was the most significant one in recent memory.

Not only was it a major inconvenience for people living and working in the central and southeast corner of the province, but it was an issue for local grocery stores as well. 

Grocery Manager for the Moose Jaw Co-Op, Rick Cartman, detailed what their power outage protocol is. 

"First of all it starts off with people working. They're working in the dark; what are you going to do in the dark? Then it's refrigeration. What are you going to do with the refrigeration system? Where are you going to store it? Going to the next step, you shut the door down. How long are we open for? How long are we closed for? Computers, we run our systems on computers, we have battery back up for so long and then it's done."

Things became bleak as the power outage that began at 9 am moved into the afternoon and there wasn't a clear timeline provided of when there would be an end. The Co-Op thankfully has some measures in place, but they only last for so long according to Cartman. 

"We were able to be online for about another half an hour after the power went out and then we had to shut down and go from there. Then we had to start planning refrigerated trucks coming into town, putting stuff into the trucks, ordering - what are we ordering, what are we not ordering."

The dreaded time during a power outage for their grocery store is reaching 12 hours. This when they have to start making tough decisions such as throwing out food and moving it to another location. 

"What we look at is after 12 hours with those freezers, then we have to evaluate and see what's going on there. The only thing is it's hard to know when it's coming back on; we rely on the radio station for a lot of that, we try and phone people, but sometimes you just can't get through."

SaskPower said on Wednesday the outage impacted almost 200,000 residents across the province. In Moose Jaw the lights were out for about six hours in total.