Skip to content

UPDATE: Thousands without power in Lake Cowichan area

a
web1_170627-LCO-PowerOut_1
A transmission outage left 3,800 customers without power on Tuesday afternoon. (BC Hydro)

a

About 3,800 BC Hydro customers were without power Tuesday afternoon after the juice was lost at 2:18 p.m.

Affected customers included those east, and north east, of South Shore Road, as well as along the Cowichan Valley Highway.

Crews were on site within minutes of the outage but the Hydro website listed the reason as “under investigation.”

BC Hydro spokesperson Karla Louwers said it was transmission outage.

“They’ve got an electrician and distribution crew dispatched to find the cause,” she said shortly after the power went out. “They’re going to patrol the transmission line to find what caused the outage.”

Louwers said the line is mostly visible from the road so it shouldn’t take too long before the problem is found.

But it turned out the problem wasn’t easily found.

Despite it being restored at 4:25 p.m. after just over two hours, BC Hydro spokesman Ted Olynyk confirmed Wednesday morning they still aren’t sure what happened.

“We don’t know,” he said. “They patrolled the line. They suspect it’s a substation but we don’t know at this point.”

It happens sometimes, Olynyk noted.

“Sometimes branches will trip out a distribution line or it’s a bird or an animal and then we can’t find the animal,” he said.