Powerful winds in the north Okanagan, Thompson and Shuswap regions overnight Tuesday left thousands of BC Hydro customers without power.
At the peak of the outages, 33,000 customers in the region were affected. BC Hydro crews were mobilized throughout the night.
“We’ve had quite a storm, we knew it was coming, we had forecast it. So we had crews and contract crews at the ready, ready to jump in,” said Dag Sharman, a BC Hydro spokesperson. “It’s a really challenging situation for us when we have a storm like this, because it’s blowing down so many trees onto our lines, blowing down lines, broken poles, damaged equipment.”
Sharman said that as of Wednesday afternoon, BC Hydro had identified 169 separate “trouble spots” in the north Okanagan, Thompson and Shuswap areas, with 19,000 customers still without power.
“The reality is there’s just so much damage out there that there may be small pockets of customers who are still out of power overnight,” Sharman said.
Crews are currently prioritizing their attention to lines that feed higher numbers of customers.