Friday, December 21, 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 and for some households and businesses is stretching now into a second day.
High winds at times reaching 90 kph subsided to the 40 to 60 kph range over night. But at least 90,000 BC Hydro customers on Vancouver Island were still without power at 6am today Friday.
The geographical distribution of outages is widespread. While normally higher density populations see power restoration sooner, this time the restoration pattern has more to do with the type and severity of technical damage to lines and equipment such as transformers and crossarms. So while some rural areas have been restored, some urban areas have not (including parts of Langford and Colwood on the west shore).
Over 550 hydro crew personnel are on the job to do the restoration work, many of them coming off or not going on holidays until all the power is back on. Some crews have come to coastal regions from the interior region.
Commercial centers — particularly shopping malls with their own power generation systems — were open for customers in the holiday shopping season last night.
Most schools in SD62 lost power yesterday but are back up and running today. Belmont Secondary in Langford kept the lights on throughout the outage including in the parking lot, with their own generator. This is the last day of school ahead of winter break.
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.
There was high demand for battery chargers at stores yesterday. Some gas stations had long lineups with people keeping tanks topped up or buying gasoline for generators.
For our posts from yesterday on various stages of the outage, please visit our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/WestShoreVoiceNews
Photo: No lights in Westhills on a rainy Thursday night during the power outage, December 20, 2018 [West Shore Voice News photo].