Tens of thousands of Nova Scotia residents suddenly found themselves in the dark Saturday morning as Nova Scotia Power reported an interruption forced them to shut off electricity for customers from Halifax to Cape Breton.
In a social media post, Nova Scotia Power, a privately owned electrical utility that supplies power throughout the province, said an interruption in a transmission line going to New Brunswick resulted in crews shutting off power in various parts of the province.
“We are working as quickly as possible to restore power, and apologize for the inconvenience,” the post read.
Nova Scotia Power said that about 47,000 customers lost power at the peak of the outages.
As of 12:17 p.m. Saturday, Nova Scotia Power’s outage map showed 23 outages throughout the province were impacting 14,334 customers.
According to the map, the most customers affected were in Cape Breton — about 5,427 near North Sydney and 5,425 in the Glace Bay area.
The service said power was expected to be restored around the Glace Bay and Port Morien area by 2:30 p.m., while it’s expected to return in the North Sydney area by 2 p.m.
About 1,200 customers were still affected in the Halifax area as of publication time, while 2,235 were without electricity in Antigonish.
In a social media post at about 1:30 p.m. on Saturday afternoon, Nova Scotia Power said that it is believed a build-up of ice on a transmission line connecting New Brunswick and Nova Scotia could have caused the outage.
“Once the tie to New Brunswick was stabilized, power to our customers was carefully restored in groups to avoid a surge on the grid,” the update read, adding that an investigation into the cause of the interruption will continue.
As of 1:35 p.m., the utility’s outage map indicated that electricity has been restored to most households throughout the province — although 50 customers still remain without power.