Saturday, December 22, 2018
By Mary P Brooke ~ West Shore Voice News
Loss of electricity to homes throughout much of coastal BC and the Lower Mainland began Thursday morning, lasted into Friday, and for some households and businesses is stretching now into a third day on this Saturday ahead of Christmas.
High winds at times reaching 90 kph on Thursday night subsided overnight to the 40 to 60 kph range by Friday.
But at least 90,000 BC Hydro customers on Vancouver Island were still without power at 6am Friday. And today even with calm weather conditions on Saturday December 22 there are still 50,519 customers without power on Vancouver Island at 5:45 pm (24,266 of those, or about half, are in the South Vancouver Island area).
The Vancouver Island outage count is over 85% of overall outages in BC right now.
Strong winds are in the Environment Canada forecast for tonight, and while in the non-severe 40 to 60 km per hour range could dislodge more tree limbs that were weakened during the gusts and blasts on Thursday and Friday.
BC Hydro says crews are working full-time, round the clock. About 550 personnel are out in the field, with several crews having come in from the interior where this storm did not hit.
The restoration pattern normally restored the most highly populated areas first. But this time it has more to do with the type and severity of technical damage to lines and equipment such as transformers and crossarms as to when service is brought back on line.
Unfortunately, now some customers will not see power restoration ahead of Christmas on Tuesday, December 25, says Olynyk.
Across from Belmont Secondary School an arbutus tree came down on Springhill Road at Glen Lake Road on Friday morning, the last day of school. BC Hydro attended to deal with the downed power line and City of Langford crews came to do cleanup but traffic was not blocked on Glen Lake Road which is a main thoroughfare between Westhills and Jenkins Avenue.
A handful of customers are without power in each of these Sooke areas: Whiffin Spit, 5400-block Sooke Road, 2000-block Gillespie Road, and 3000-block Phillips Road. About 200 are affected west of Otter Point Road. And about 30 customers are affected along parts of West Coast Road.
Small clusters of customers are without power in many areas of Metchosin, Central Saanich, North Saanich, Sidney, and large areas of North Cowichan and the Gulf Islands (Ganges, Mayne and Saturna). Many of those outages started today, some are continuing from Thursday and Friday.
Commercial centers — particularly shopping malls with their own power generation systems — were open for customers in the holiday shopping season on Thursday night during the storm. Some stores never lost power, so their grocery stock was in good shape this weekend for last-minute Christmas dinner shopping.
Lighting repairs and road debris clearing were done during the storm by municipal crews in Langford and Colwood, and by Mainroad South Island in their service area which includes Highways 1, 14, and 18 and the Shawnigan Lake area.
People are reminded to turn off most lights and possibly even unplug appliances during an outage so that when power comes back on there is less load for the system to deal with right away. Wait 15 minutes before fully engaging all electrical demand, says BC Hydro.
Fire departments remind people to not leave candles unattended. If running a generator, be attentive to the possibility of carbon monoxide poisoning.
There was high demand for battery chargers at stores on Thursday and Friday. Some gas stations had long lineups with people keeping tanks topped up or buying gasoline for generators.
