Hydro crews were able to quickly fix the malfunction that shut all of Quesnel down on June 25. File photo

Hydro crews were able to quickly fix the malfunction that shut all of Quesnel down on June 25. File photo

12,000 affected by Quesnel power outage

Faulty equipment to blame for malfunction

  • Jun. 25, 2018 12:00 a.m.

A power outage brought the entire city of Quesnel to a halt on Monday morning (June 25).

The outage occurred shortly after 8:30 a.m. as B.C. Hydro crews were doing some maintenance work on one of the transmission lines says Dave Mosure, the community relations coordinator for Northern B.C. for B.C. Hydro.

“When they opened a switch there was a malfunction,” he explains.

“[The crew] did some switching to bypass the offending piece of equipment as quickly as they could, which was shortly after nine.”

Mosure says 12,016 were affected by the outage.

B.C Hydro breaks Quesnel down into four sections, all of which lost power.

These include: West of Red Bluff Road and south of Baker Creek Road; east of Bryce Road; east of Garner Road and; east of Glassford Road, south of Quesnel Canyon Road.

“When you’re working on the transmission level voltages you wind up with a much larger affected area,” Mosure says.

“In this case it just comes down to a piece of defective equipment breaking.”

To report an outage, call 1-800 BCHYDRO


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