The scheduled 12-5 p.m. emergency power outage on Thursday, July 3 for the entire Woss-north region (except Port Alice, which was hooked up to a generator) was a necessary one, says BC Hydro spokesperson Ted Olynyk.
"We know it was unfortunately short notice for this outage and it's a busy time of year for businesses, tourists, and industry," Olynyk stated when asked to comment, "and we really appreciated everybody's understanding of why we had to do it."
BC Hydro realized only the day before there was a broken cross arm on a transmission structure just south of Woss and they were going to have to act quickly to replace it before it failed and potentially caused a fire, spreading the word about the short-notice outage via social media and the North Island Gazette newspaper.
"Things went very well for our crews," said Olynyk about the work that was done during the outage. "I think we got the power back on around 3:30 p.m., which was earlier than we'd anticipated. We had multiple crews helping out with great planning by the team and the managers in getting the work done, but what really made a big difference is we had crews come in from holidays willing to help out at the last minute. So that sped things up."
Olynyk noted BC Hydro crew members all live in the communities across the island and are sensitive to outages, wanting to restore power as fast as possible.
"They're dedicated to what they do," he said. "They're community-minded. They want to restore power as quickly as they can because they realize the impact these outages have on the communities. Hats off to the crew members who came in from holidays to get the job done. It sped things up quite a bit and lessened the impact on our customers."
