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BC Hydro turning off Powell River power tomorrow for emergency repairs

POWELL RIVER, B.C- Powell River won’t have any power tomorrow.

According to BC Hydro, an emergency power outage is being scheduled for Powell River, Cortes Island, and Texada Island from 9:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., impacting all customers in those areas.

The power authourity website stated that would be a total of 12809 people.

“A recent storm caused damaged to a transmission structure and power line in the area, and BC Hydro must take an outage to safely complete the required repair work,” read a notice from Powell River’s municipal government.

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“Because the work involves a helicopter, it must be completed on December 19 ahead of the next storm which is forecasted for December 20. Helicopter work needs to be completed in fair weather during daylight hours.”

The city stated that the storm would likely cause the transmission structure to completely fail, which would result in a much longer outage for customers.

“BC Hydro thanks customers for their patience as it completes this important work,” read the notice.

“We looked at all the ways to make it happen while minimizing the impact to our customers and whether we could give more notice to the community before we have the outage,” said Ted Olynyk, BC Hydro manager for communication relations for Vancouver Island and the Sunshine Coast, speaking to the Powell River Peak newspaper.

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“But that is not possible because we expect a significant weather event on Thursday and this work requires a helicopter, so we have to do it tomorrow.”

In the paper’s report, Olynyk said BC Hydro hopes to have the work completed sooner than 2:30 pm but indicated the weather will be a factor.

“The last thing we want to do is take out a community the size of Powell River,” he told the paper.

“We regret this major inconvenience to our customers at this time of year but it is something we have to do. We either have a planned outage and notify customers as much as we can, or we have an unplanned outage. We want to get this work done before we have any failure to the system.”

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