High winds have been wreaking havoc for BC Hydro across Northwest and Northeast portions of B.C.
On Jan. 11, 2014, a large swathe of the Burns Lake area was without power.
“Saturday’s outage… affected 3852 customers in Burns Lake and area, including as far down to the south side of Francois Lake and Colleymount,” said BC Hydro representative Bob Gammer.
“The initial cause was not determined, but something caused a fault on the transmission line between our Glenannan Substation, located west of Houston and the Burns Lake Substation. The fault resulted in an outage to the entire Burns Lake Substation and all customers fed from there. Following the fault, a piece of protective equipment did not operate properly and so the circuit would not close – keeping the power off to Burns Lake.”
“BC Hydro crews investigated, patrolled the transmission line, set up a by-pass of the protective equipment and restored power to Burns Lake. Power went out at 11:20 a.m. and was back on at 3:05 p.m., a total of three hours and 45 minutes.”
A few days following that outage, a large windstorm swept across the region.
“At the peak around 10 p.m. [Jan. 14, 2014], approximately 22,000 BC Hydro customers were without power in an area stretching from Terrace to Tumbler Ridge and Fort Nelson,” Gammer said.
“BC Hydro customers in the Burns Lake area were also hit by windstorm-related outages as trees contacted power lines in several locations in the community, the south side of Francois Lake and north to Fort Babine and Takla Landing. For several hours about 1800 customers in the Lakes District were without power.”
By early evening the next day, power had been resorted to all but 300 customers in the area, with full power restored to all but six customers by last Friday morning.