Power was knocked out across a large region of the B.C. Interior Thursday morning, ranging from Kelowna to as far south as Keremeos.
“We are still working to restore power in our Keremeos, so it was across our service territory, said Fortis spokesperson Grace Pickell, noting that power was restored for the majority of customers in 30 minutes.
Power was back up in Penticton quickly, but the cause of an outage that knocked out power to the north end of the city, including downtown, is still under investigation.
“We’re working with FortisBC and they are working with B.C. Hydro. It has to do with a feed problem from B.C. Hydro, that is what we have been told by Fortis,” said Mitch Moroziuk, the city’s director of operations.
Pickell said the outage was caused by a transmission line related event, but the power utility is still assessing the actual cause..
Moroziuk explained the city’s electric utility was looking at switching customers from the Westminster substation, the one affected, to the Carmi and Huth substations if the power wasn’t restored.
“This is a good time of year for power outages to occur because you don’t have a lot of heating and air conditioning load,” said Moroziuk, prior to the power being restored. “That’s what we are looking at right now, but we should be able to do that.”
