The North Island village of Port Alice was without power for about 38 hours this week thanks to some major power line damage.
The power went off around 11:46 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 19 and BC Hydro wasn't able to get it back on until around 2 p.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 21. There were 673 BC Hydro customers without power during the outage.
"A tree failed unfortunately, it came down on our lines during the coldest day of the year so far," said Ted Olynyk, BC Hydro spokesperson. "When we went into the site where the outage occurred we found a structure with some significant damage, so we made the repairs and it took awhile to get the power restored."
BC Hydro brought in brought crews in from down-Island to help expedite the repairs knowing how cold the weather temperature was.
"We had crews working till midnight one night and we were able to bring more crews in to help finish repairs to get the power back on as quickly as possible," confirmed Olynyk, who added the timing of the outage was "really unfortunate, you never know when a tree can fail. It's a reminder we always need to be prepared, you never know when a power outage can take place."
No official records for Port Alice were immediately available, but nearby Port Hardy reported temperatures ranging from -3 to 7 C during the outage, according to Accuweather.
