Toovey Heights residents were greeted this morning by a FortisBC electrical service power outage Tuesday morning which many claim they were given no advance notice about.
Margo McMahan, a Toovey Heights resident, feels the lack of notification was unacceptable for their neighbourhood.
“It’s not acceptable for something like on a hot day when people are running their air conditioning or who get in and out of their houses through their garages,” McMahan said.
“I know of one neighbour who uses her door inside the garage to access her home and didn’t have another key, so she came home and the garage door wouldn’t work and her young son was inside the house. He was able to open another door to let her in otherwise she would have been locked out.”
McMahan said another neighbour told he he talked to a Fortis worker on site who told him the power shutdown was related to infrastructure service work being done for subdivision extension to Toovey Heights, located in east Kelowna off Highway 33.
“It’s ridiculous many of us didn’t appear to be warned about this.”
She said it’s just another disruption Toovey Heights residents have to deal with, already faced with constant dynamite blasting and construction for a new Black Mountain subdivision on Mine Hill above them that causes vibrations to many of their homes.
But Diane Sorace, spokesperson for FortisBC, said this was a pre-planned maintenance outage, and customer call-out advanced warnings were carried out for Toovey Heights residents.
“There were 175 homes affected by this and they should all have been contacted by our customer service department about the planned outage,” Sorace said.
“That is our policy for giving people advance notice when power outages will occur. If it’s above 500 residences affected, we do use radio, social media and advertising to reach out to affected customers.”
She suggested those who had no advance notice may have contact information that is out of date and should follow up on that with FortisBC by calling 1-866-436-7847.
As well, she noted the public utility also has an pre-planned power outage map to outline where service interruptions will occur and for how long. That map can be check out online at www.fortisbc.com/outages.
Sorace said it’s expected the power will be restored to Toovey Heights residents by 1 p.m. today.
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