Nova Scotia Power says they appreciate customer’s patience as hundreds of crew members worked through challenging conditions over the weekend when a fierce windstorm hit the province hard.
Winds clocked in at over 110 km/h – over 120 km/h in Cape Breton – Friday into Saturday, forcing trees onto powerlines and breaking about 45 power poles, putting roughly 198,000 in the dark.
Photo: Nova Scotia Power
The utility tells us in an email, within the first 24 hours, roughly 85 per cent of customers had their power back, however, those who are still out, Monday, are either one customer or less than 10.
“Restoration efforts can take a little longer at this stage as each of these outages can be more complex and may require more than one crew to restore power,” reads the email.
Nova Scotia Power says they tried reaching out to those with their power still out, Sunday evening, to provide updates.
“Trees on power lines has been the biggest challenge. Crews have been working with forestry crews to cut and remove the trees so repairs can be made,” says Nova Scotia Power. “Access has also been a challenge in some areas, with crews needing to use off road vehicles to get to a site, walk in with their gear and climb the poles, or wade into swampy areas to make repairs.”
A tree in a power line in Lower Sackville.
Photo: Nova Scotia Power
The Emergency Operations Centre remains open and will until every customer has power restored.
Storm Lead Pam Scully-Porier says it’s part of how they prepare.
“We bring in folks from across the business, representing customer care, representing operations and make sure that we have a centralized gathering to respond to outages,” said Scully-Porier.
She added, “We restore power in a specific order, starting with any public safety concerns. We then focus on high-voltage transmission lines to get the largest number of customers restored.
From there, we work with EMO to focus on critical services like hospitals, shelters, water facilities and telecommunications, followed by area-specific restoration.
After every storm, the utility says, they will debrief to continuously improve their response.
