BC Hydro is confident the remaining 5,000 BC Hydro customers north of Barriere will be back online at noon today. This follows an outage earlier affecting nearly 10,000 customers in areas including Kamloops, Heffley Creek, McLure, Barriere, Darfield, Clearwater, Blue River, Valemount and McBride.  

 

Patrol by helicopter at first light this morning identified the cause of this transmission line outage to be a pole fire approximately 25km north of Barriere.

 

Crews have been active since the outage started around 1:30 this morning and are working as fast and safe as possible to restore power.

 

Power was restored around 5:30am for customers between Kamloops and Barriere, including Barriere.

 

“We try to provide an accurate time estimation of when the power will be back on. Sometimes we can bypass a problem and restore power sooner than expected. In other cases, the cause of the power outage may be difficult to locate or access or there may be several problems so the repair may take longer than estimated” said Jeanette Hoft, Community Relations Manager for BC Hydro’s Thompson/Okanagan/Columbia Region

 

“With the upcoming summer months, outages will again be experienced due to storms, lightning strikes, wind and fires. “We urge residential and business customers to be prepared for these outages”, said Hoft.