BC Storm: Some will spend Christmas 2018 in the dark
Posted December 23, 2018 11:45 am.
Last Updated December 23, 2018 8:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) — More than 30,000 BC Hydro customers are still without power on Sunday as Christmas Eve approaches. Around 200 customers on the Lower Mainland and the Sunshine Coast are without power.
Tanya Fish, BC Hydro spokesperson, says they have restored power to more than 500,000 customers since they lost power in last Thursday’s storm. Earlier today, she said they were working on about 44,000 outages, with 4,000 of them in the Lower Mainland and the Fraser Valley and the rest on the southern Gulf Islands and Vancouver Island, but not everyone will be back on the grid by Christmas.
The latest BC Hydro numbers fluctuate in the tally of outages in B.C., hence the discrepancies over the last few days.
“We are working to getting power back as quickly as we can,” Fish tells NEWS 1130. “Unfortunately, we do anticipate we will have some customers in the most severe, hard-hit areas without power through Christmas Day.”
Those areas include Nanaimo, Duncan and the southern Gulf Islands. Fish says BC Hydro crews call the damage “complete devastation” that they “have never seen before” and the utility has brought in crews from other parts of the B.C., as well as contractors from Alberta and the East Coast.
“We appreciate everyone’s ongoing patience, we know how extreme and hard it is to be without power for this long, never mind it being so close to Christmas,” she says. “Just know that we are out there trying to get power back on as quickly as we can.”
— with files from Peter Wagner
