by LAURA KEIL
Residents and businesses lost power on Friday, some for as long as five hours due to a transmission circuit failure. BC Hydro says the suspected cause was lightning.
At 4:15pm on Friday the power went out from Valemount to Dome Creek. Approx. 2500 customers were affected. BC Hydro says 1546 customers had power restored around 7:30. Most other people had lights turn on around 9:15pm.
“We are now on town generators and with the IPPs in the valley,” McBride Public Works Foreman Matthew Slaney wrote online at 8pm. “Within minutes of the outage village staff and more than a dozen hydro personnel were working very hard to restore our power. The issue has been resolved and we now have power.”
But many residents questioned the long delay in restoring power to McBride, since the Village has backup generators that are supposed to kick in.
BC Hydro spokesperson Mary Anne Coules told the Goat in July that another outage in the Robson Valley was averted by using the diesel generators and Hystad Creek IPP as backup measures.
Due to a tight deadline, BC Hydro did not respond to our questions about backup power by presstime.
