About 150,000 households are without power in British Columbia after strong winds battered coastal areas and a large swath of the central Interior, and for many the outages could continue overnight.
The BC Hydro outage map shows about 115,000 of those customers are in the Lower Mainland and on the Sunshine Coast, while the power is out for about 34,000 customers across Vancouver Island, down from close to 46,000 earlier in the day.
Bulletins on the BC Hydro website say the Crown utility is asking customers along the south coast to “prepare for the possibility of being without power overnight.”
The utility says its crews are working to repair damage to electrical equipment, with priority for outages involving downed lines that could pose a risk to public safety.
It says the next focus is restoring power to critical and municipal services, followed by outages affecting large numbers of customers, then smaller outages.
BC Hydro had earlier said Surrey, White Rock, Victoria and Sechelt were among the areas hardest hit by the winds that prompted warnings from Environment Canada about gusts reaching speeds of up to 100 kilometres an hour in Metro Vancouver.
The utility says it had been planning for the storm, and all of its available crews and contractors were working to repair the damage and restore power.
A multi-year drought has weakened trees across the province, making them more susceptible to wind, and the storm has knocked down many dead or damaged trees and branches over its electrical equipment, BC Hydro says in a statement.
Environment Canada has lifted wind warnings for eastern Vancouver Island and the central coast, but warnings remain in effect for the island’s west coast, as well as Victoria, Metro Vancouver and parts of the Fraser Valley, along with a large area of the Interior stretching from 70 Mile House in the south to Burns Lake in the north.
The weather office says gusts of wind could reach speeds of up to 90 kilometres an hour in Greater Victoria, increasing to 100 kilometres an hour on the west coast of Vancouver Island.
In Metro Vancouver and the eastern Fraser Valley, winds with gusts of up to 100 or 90 kilometres an hour, respectively, were expected to ease by Monday evening.
In the central Interior, Environment Canada says strong winds were expected to peak at 70 kilometres an hour with gusts up to 90 kilometres an hour.
Winter storm warnings and bulletins are also in effect for several stretches of highway in southern B.C., where the weather office says strong winds and heavy snow will create “near-zero visibilities and treacherous driving conditions.”
The warnings cover the Coquihalla Highway from Hope to Merritt and Highway 3 from the Paulson summit area to the Kootenay Pass.
The snow was expected to taper off overnight, with accumulations ranging from about 20 centimetres at the Coquihalla summit to about 40 centimetres along the Kootenay Pass by Tuesday morning, the warning bulletin says.
Lower-level special weather statements are in effect for the Coquihalla Highway between Merritt and Kamloops, as well as Highway 3 from Hope to Princeton and the Okanagan Connector from Merritt to Kelowna, where the forecast calls for snowfall ranging from five to 10 centimetres.
