NANAIMO — Thousands of people on Vancouver Island remain in the dark amid wide-ranging power outages from a strong wind storm.
BC Hydro crews continue responding to dozens of outages on the mid-Island and a number of other Island communities, which began around 9 a.m. on Monday, Dec. 15, with utility spokesperson Ted Olynyk saying communities from Campbell River to Victoria were impacted.
Olynyk added at the storm’s peak, around 10,000 customers were without power through Parksville-Qualicum and rural Oceanside, with several thousands more down in the Nanaimo area.
“It’s too early to tell what progress we made today [on repairs]. Crews are out there restoring, fortunately this happened during daylight hours, when crews are all out there, so everybody’s doing a full court press to get the power restored. At the peak, we had 40,000 customers on the Island.”
The Cowichan Valley was also hit hard, Olynyk said.
As of 3:30 p.m. on Monday, the most notable outages were in the Oceanside region, including one impacting 2,700 customers in Qualicum Beach.
Homes and businesses in Parksville, Errington, Coombs, Hilliers and Bowser were also without electricity for a majority of the day.
In Nanaimo, one major outage covered the bottom half of Nanaimo’s Bowen Park, part of the downtown and the Old City Quarter, with approximately 1,500 customers affected.
Several other smaller outages are impacting dozens of Hydro customers.
Most are due to be restored by Monday evening.
Olynyk said recent weather has been a challenge.
“These strong winds, coupled with the drenching that we’ve had the last few days, makes the ground really susceptible and soft and a lot easier for trees to come over. We had a lot of a trees come down on lines which just makes things a lot worse, and a headache for us and serving for our customers.”
Nanaimo was briefly the hot spot in Canada on Monday, reaching 15.4 degrees, shortly after the peak of the wind storm.
Information on current power outages in the province can be found at BC Hydro’s website linked here.
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