Power outage persists for more than 50K on Van Island, 6K Lower Mainland and Sunshine Coast
Posted December 22, 2018 8:36 am.
Last Updated October 25, 2019 8:38 pm.
VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) — The wind storm that blew through B.C. on Thursday was the worst in over 20 years, and thousands of people still don’t have power this morning.
According to BC Hydro, more than 50,000 customers on the Island are still in the dark, as are more than 7,000 people on the Lower Mainland and the Sunshine Coast. Tanya Fish, spokesperson for the utility company, says they have 800 people working around the clock to make repairs.
“We have brought in crews from other parts of the province to assist with our restoration efforts and we also have called the crews off their vacation time in order to assist as we work to get power back to all of our customers.”
But there is no firm timeline for when that will happen. Fish says in the worst cases, it could still be days. She says field crews surveying the damage on Vancouver Island have said some areas are “complete devastation.”
“The Gulf islands are also very hard hit area. We do still have blocked roads where crews aren’t able to get to certain areas, to access the areas where they need to make repairs,” she says.
“One broken power pole can take up to eight hours to repair, so you can imagine the amount of power poles we still have to replace and the amount of power lines that are still down. These repairs do take a lot of time.”
She does thank British Columbians affected by the outages for their patience, especially as Christmas is rolling in.
— with files from Jonathan Szekeres
