After losing their power for nearly 24 hours, residents in Peachland will once again be without electricity. The entire community lost power Tuesday night because of the snowstorm. Power was restored a day later but the repair job was temporary and now crews need to do a more permanent fix.
“We wanted to get customers on as quickly as we could and it was a big job to do on the fly like that so what they did was make temporary repairs to the pole to get power back,” says BC Hydro spokesperson Dag Sharman.
The outage is scheduled for Friday starting at 10 a.m. It could last up to eight hours until 6 p.m. It will affect the entire community.
Wednesday’s outage had a big impact on local businesses which had to close for the day. Peachland pharmacy was one of them. It used a generator to keep the fridge running because it had medicine and vaccinations inside.
“We had a lot of patients coming in even though we are close for emergency prescriptions,” says pharmacist Wesley Bedford Jr. “We can’t fill prescriptions without the internet so we could do one day prescriptions. We had enough power to do emergency stuff for people.”
Mayor-elect Cindy Fortin is concerned about the lengthy outage especially because the community has a high population of seniors. She says that the outage and an action plan to deal with future outages will be the first thing she discusses with her new council when it’s sworn in next week.
As for Friday’s planned outage, The District of Peachland is again opening the community centre on 6th street off of Beach Avenue where residents can gather to keep warm.
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