Prince George,  B.C. –  Nearly 6,000 BC Hydro customers in  Prince George are  without power  as  electricity has been cut to a number of  neighbourhoods.B.C. Hydro is  saying a substation fault is to blame for the outage. Crews are on scene,   but at this point  there has been no estimate  of when power  might be restored.

BC Hydro’s Bob Gammer says  crews have yet to  determine  the cause of the outage, “It looks like the source of the problem may be in the Foothills substation, that’s under investigation right now.”

He says  it  could be an equipment malfunction, it could  be a lightning strike, or perhaps a bird shorted  out the system.  “Until a cause is  determined and they really have had a chance to assess what needs to be fixed then, we’ll have a good  picture of how long it will take to restore.”

He says in the meantime,  crews are also  looking to see if they can do some switching “So while they are working on the problem inside the substation,   they can also be working to restore customers through other means  it doesn’t mean everybody will be back on, but at least we can start reducing the size of this outage bit by bit.”

In all,  5,798 customers are without power.  Here are the  impacted areas: