Tuesday December 31, 2019 ~ SOUTH VANCOUVER ISLAND
~ West Shore Voice News
=========== UPDATES:
- Update at 3:10 pm January 1: pretty much all outages have been resolved.
- Update at 9 am January 1: # of customers without power on south Vancouver Island now is 1,528. Power back on in the Colwood/Langford and east Sooke areas, but at 3:26 am about 550 BC Hydro customers lost power in the Sooke area.
- Update at 1:30 am January 1: strong winds in the west shore and coastal areas. 6,297 customers presently without power in a total of 17 outages in the south island, a number of those in the Esquimalt area. Check the outages page on the BC Hydro website for updates.
========== ORIGINAL ARTICLE:
It’s been raining heavily this evening on New Year’s Eve, with wind gusts. This has contributed to power outages in the South Vancouver Island area.
As of 9:10 pm there are 1,598 BC Hydro customers without power on South Vancouver Island, stated in some cases by BC Hydro as “tree down across our wires”. As of 9:25 pm the outage count was up, with 3,815 customers without power.
Three outages that occurred between 7:37 pm and 8:14 pm continue in Sooke/East Sooke (723 BC Hydro billing addresses without power), Duncan (783 addresses), and Saanich/Central Saanich (92 addresses). Most of those are rural/remote locations. Lights flickered in some urban areas but there were no outages.
Then four outages occurring after that including one in Colwood/Langford at 9:09 pm producing an electricity outage for 1,691 locations.
For the first three outages, crews are enroute to arrive on-scene in a time window between 9:40 pm and 10 pm. For the other outages crews have been assigned (last update 9:30 pm).
With approximately two persons per address, that’s about 3,200 people spending new year’s eve without electricity.
Environment Canada earlier today issued a rainfall warning for parts of the West Island as a frontal system dumped rainfall totals near 100 mm of rain Tuesday. The South Island will not see as much rainfall as that, but amounts will be significant enough to make it a wet new year’s eve.