After a heavy wind and rainstorm swept through the Maritime region on Monday, many neighbourhoods throughout New Brunswick are still without power as the week comes to a close and the holidays get closer.
Stephanie Roy, a resident of the Sunshine Gardens neighbourhood in Fredericton, said the most challenging conditions of living without power in December is the lack of heat. She’s now entering her fourth day with the lights off.
“Eventually, you’re putting on layers and wearing indoors what you’re wearing outdoors,” she said in an interview outside her home on Thursday.
Roy, who hosts two international students attending a nearby high school, said she wasn’t too worried when initially losing electricity as she expected the outage was only going to last a day.
“We thought ‘It’s just going to go for today, we can manage it’ … but then in the evening, there was still no power, and we put in another night,” she continued. “And then one of my students said, ‘It’s so cold’ and my other student, who’s quite shy, said ‘Yes, it’s so cold.'”
Roy described trying to stay in her home without a proper heating source as “bone-chilling.”
As of 2:00 p.m. on Thursday, there are still about 21,000 households in New Brunswick without power after wind gusts up to 100 km/h were felt throughout the province on Monday.
Nicole Porier, vice president of Operations for NB Power, said the electric utility’s main objective is to have power restored for all New Brunswick residents before Christmas.
“Our teams and crews are working so hard to have that because I understand how hard it is for our customers,” she said during a press conference with the New Brunswick provincial government on Thursday afternoon, adding that about 108,000 customers have seen their power restored since the initial blackout.
She said there’s currently about 800 people spread across 340 crews working to get the lights back on across the province, with assistance from 111 crews that arrived from outside New Brunswick on Thursday.
Poirier noted that NB Power wasn’t anticipating the amount of damage that ended up unfolding in certain regions. Therefore the utility didn’t request any provincial help prior to the storm.
“We were prepared with what we felt we needed to respond. Once the storm hit, we saw winds like we’ve never seen, damage like we were not predicting, based on what we saw last week,” she said.
During Thursday’s media availability, New Brunswick Public Safety Minister Kris Austin encouraged residents to register any damages incurred as a result of the storm so the province can determine whether disaster financial assistance (DFA) will be distributed.
“There is a threshold that has to be met before the DFA can kick in,” he said. “There has to be three million dollars in uninsured losses before it can take affect and it only covers necessities that insurance does not cover.”
As for Roy, she said her students have since gone to stay at a friend’s house, while she’s staying with her daughter’s place until power is restored in her area.
“There are (NB Power) trucks in the neighbourhood so we’re getting very excited, I think more excited than for Santa Claus,” she laughed. “We’re hoping that we’ll be having our power today.”
— with files from Global News’ Silas Brown
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