Number 10 of NEWS 1130’s Top 10 of 2015

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – First it was the wind, then many of us were left in the dark.

It was August 29th when the wind struck and what started as a strong breeze turned into a menacing force.

The wind only reached speeds of 80km/h, far less than any hurricane forces. But Brian Quinn with the Vancouver Park Board explained why it wreaked so much havoc: “This time of the year with the trees, the canopy is completely full of leaves, they act more as a wind sail and catch more of the wind. That’s probably the biggest factor that plays in this situation” Many of those trees fell down on power lines. At one point, 700,000 customers were left without power.

Simi Heer with BC Hydro says crews were able to respond in record time.

“The clean-up and repair process was very extensive. We did have 95 per cent of our customers restored within 48 hours and that is the fastest we have ever restored power after a large storm like this.”

But BC Hydro didn’t get through the storm unscathed, as the combination of power outages and a large influx of people on their website caused it to crash.

Heer says they learned a lesson.

“Since then, we have taken steps to fix the problem and prevent it from happening again,” says Heer.

“The capacity of the website is being increased to handle more users and more data. We know the website is a key place for customers to go for outage information. We have these great outage maps that customers can see to figure out which areas are affected. Those sorts of things use data. So with the unprecedented number of outages we had… the maps the website was required to generate… we did see issues with the website. But we did fix those.”

For the people who want more buried power lines, Heer says the 77,000 km’s of infrastructure would be too expensive to move. She says these events are hard to predict, but BC Hydro will be ready if a storm strikes again.

Monday, we’ll continue our countdown of the top stories of 2015. Click here to listen to our team’s on-air reports.

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