Hundreds of BC Hydro customers experienced blackouts in areas surrounding Campbell River on Thursday, as intense winds knocked out power lines across Vancouver Island, the Lower Mainland and the Sunshine Coast.
Crews managed to restore power for most local customers by late in the day, but several hundred were still in the dark by Friday morning, according to notices on BC Hydro’s online outages list and map.
The biggest ongoing outage in the region appeared to be a large area running along Highway 19 including Sayward and points south. That blackout began at 2:53 p.m. on Thursday and still affected 661 customers by Friday morning, according to BC Hydro.
Near Stories Beach, a blackout that began Thursday at around 8:30 p.m. still affected a handful of customers on the 3900 block of Dolphin Road.
A larger blackout also affected 162 customers around Oyster River following an outage that began on Thursday night just before 9 p.m.
In the Black Creek area, there were two small outages that began Thursday evening and were ongoing late Friday morning.
There were also two ongoing blackouts around Gold River, one of them affecting 68 customers since 5:55 p.m. on Thursday and another affecting a small number of customers since 3:16 p.m. that day.
Cortes and Quadra blackouts
In the Squirrel Cove area of Cortes Island, 91 customers still lacked power following a blackout that began at 4:36 p.m on Thursday.
In the Smelt Bay area of southern Cortes Island, power remained out for another 20 customers, following a 7:50 p.m. Thursday power failure.
Smaller outages affecting a handful of customers were also listed as ongoing on Quadra Island, including two blackouts on the island’s southern tip and another near Bold Point, northeast of Heriot Bay.
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Meanwhile, the power company reported that it had restored electricity for more than 750 customers Thursday in the Campbell River area, many of them on Quadra and Cortes islands.
It was just a small part of a much larger series of blackouts that continued following a powerful wind storm that rocked the south coast on Thursday.
On the North Island alone, there were some 187 outages affecting upwards of 42,000 customers ongoing by about 8:30 a.m. on Friday, BC Hydro reported.
Blackouts also persisted for more than 62,000 customers in the Lower Mainland and the Sunshine Coast, and for some 48,000 customers on the South Island.
A wind warning issued by Environment Canada on Thursday stated that winds would reach 70-90 km/h, with gusts likely exceeding 100 km/h.
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