Power outages have been the story on Friday as a widespread outage hit southern Vancouver Island.
The outage affected just north of Duncan and ran down the Trans Canada Highway affecting all up to and including Langford. Saanich was also affected by the outage, but downtown Victoria remained unaffected.
The outage map listed around 85,000 customers without power in over 40 different outages. A transmission circuit failure has been listed across the board as the cause.
BC Hydro spokesperson Ted Olynyk says the roots of the problem were in Victoria.
“We were doing work at the Georgian Strip substation, down in Victoria, and something tripped within the substation,” says Olynyk. “Unfortunately it resulted in an outage to about 85,000 customers in the south Vancouver Island area.”
Power dropped off at around 1:15 pm and was back on in most places by 2 pm.
“It’s still early to determine exactly what the cause was,” says Olynyk.
A separate outage also hit before the larger power outage in Cowichan Bay affecting 1353 customers. Power was off at about 9:55 am and was restored at around 1 pm. The cause of that outage is known to BC Hydro, but was not specified.
