Hundreds of thousands of BC Hydro customers lost power at various times on Wednesday, as the province grappled with a storm that brought up to 30 centimtres of snow in some areas.
The utility deployed crews across the Lower Mainland, Sunshine Coast and Vancouver Island to restore power to affected customers, sending out regular social media updates on affected areas and households.
On X, formerly Twitter, BC Hydro posted that throughout the day, at least 2,800 customers lost power on the North Shore, more than 2,300 lost power in Vancouver, and some 7,770 experienced a blackout in Richmond and Steveston.
Between Burnaby, Port Moody and Coquitlam, another 7,148 or so also lost power at various times. In Delta, blackouts had affected about 730 people.
Surrey was heavily impacted as well, with roughly 7,300 households losing power.
On Vancouver Island, another 14,000 or so customers went without electricity across Sooke, Parksville, Nanoose Bay, Errington, Coombs, Lantzville, Saanich, and more.
More than a thousand people were also impacted each on Mayne Island, Pender Island and Gabriola Island. Close to 550 were impacted on Saturna Island.
As of 7:30 p.m., BC Hydro’s website stated that all together, more than 214,000 customers in the Lower Mainland and on the Sunshine Coast had been affected by 948 outages — with power restored.
Nearly 122,000 had lost power on Vancouver Island, and later had it restored. In the Okanagan, 10,614 people who lost power had it restored, as did 9,548 people in the Thompson and Shuswap regions.
About 15,350 northern residents lost power but got it back as well.
Some 13,300 people across the province were still without power by 7:30 p.m.
BC Hydro says customers can stay up-to-date with information on its website and its social media page.