Power back on at Surrey Food Bank after five days in the dark

After five days of being left in the dark by last weekend’s wicked windstorm, the power is back on at the Surrey Food Bank.

The loss of power meant thousands of pounds of food donated to the bank had to be thrown out.

Marilyn Herrmann with the food bank says they have a couple of refrigerators that can last for up to 36 hours without power, but on Day 5 many products had to be discarded.

About $2,000 to $3,000 worth of milk and eggs that the bank has purchased went bad and were disposed of.

In addition, about 10,000 pounds of donated vegetables, fruit, cheese, yogurt and bread had to be thrown out.

“We are the ones who are the last to get our power back,” says Herrmann. “We have been struggling in the dark for days. I believe we are very much an essential service in our community. So it has been very frustrating.”

As of Wednesday morning, 400 customers around Lower Mainland still remain without power in the single largest outage event in BC Hydro’s history.

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.

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.

Meanwhile, the Surrey Food Bank is looking to restock its supplies.

Herrmann says Overwaitea Foods has offered to replace the non-perishable food items that had to be discarded.

But the food bank will not be accepting perishable items at this point because their coolers are not fully functional yet.

However, donations can be made online at www.surreyfoodbank.org/donate.

The food bank will still be open until 1 p.m. this afternoon for their Tiny Bundles distribution.

With files from Grace Ke