Power Failure May Be Weather Related

BC Hydro is trying to get power back on to about 200 customers near Okanagan College.

Hydro’s Dag Sharman says an equipment failure on a pole on the DND lands knocked out power to about 297 customers earlier this morning.

“It requires us replacing some equipment and rebuilding that pole and replacing some wire. It’s a bit of a job and it’s a bit of a difficult access area to. That’s why it’s taking some time. Our crews have been out and have reconfigured the system to feed as many customers as we can from a different source.”

Ninety-seven customers have had power restored.

“Well, for the rest of the customers we aren’t able to reconfigure where they get their power from so we have to rebuild that section of the line before we can get them back on.”

It could be as late as 4 this afternoon before everybody is back on.

The outage also affected the Vernon campus of Okanagan College, which was forced to cancel morning classes.

Afternoon classes are on.

It’s not clear was caused the equipment failure, but it may have been weather related.

Dag Sharman says Hydro expects problems when we get heavy, wet snow like what is happening today burdening power lines.

“That’s the sort of thing we do see in that sort of scenario. so, we’ll be on the lookout for that today and our crews are prepared. We knew this was coming so we are prepared and have folks at the ready to respond if there are outages caused by the weather.”