WATCH: A closer look at the largest blackout in BC Hydro’s history and why the frustrations aren’t over for everyone yet. Jeremy Hunka reports.
As BC Hydro works to re-connect the remainder of its customers who lost power during the largest windstorm to hit Metro Vancouver in a decade, the scale of the outage is becoming more apparent.
The crown corporation says 710,000 or 50 per cent of its 1.4 million customers on Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland lost power due to Saturday’s windstorm.
That makes it the single largest outage event in BC Hydro’s history.
READ MORE: Massive Metro Vancouver storm leads to power outages, fallen trees
BC Hydro says 25 of its transmission circuits were damaged in the storm compared to just 12 during the big windstorm of 2006 when it took 10 days to completely restore power. That outage cost $15.4 million to fix. It is unclear what the bill for this weekend’s power outage will be just yet.
Since Saturday, BC Hydro says it has been working through 1,800 “trouble calls” related to the storm. It says, on average, crews respond to about 2,000 trouble calls a month across the province. Crews, some of whom have been called in from as far away as Prince George and Fort St. John, restored power to more than 705,000 customers over a span of 72 hours.
As of this morning, fewer than 160 customers are still in the dark.
BC Hydro says their crews continue to work as quickly as possible to restore power.
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