It will be another day or two before B.C. Hydro knows just what caused the outage this afternoon which plunged much of the north into the dark.

An equipment failure at the Williston sub-station south of Prince George triggered protective equipment which shut down power along a grid that serves parts of Quesnel, Prince George, and communities north through to Fort St. John .

In all, more than 30 thousand customers were without power, some for 15 minutes, others 2 and a half hours, and some are still without power.

When asked if B.C. Hydro should be concerned that one sub- station problem could plunge such a huge area of the province into the dark, B.C. Hydro‘s Bob Gammer says certainly he will acknowledge that a large portion of the province was impacted. Gammer adds it is too early to say if this is something to be overly concerned about “The investigation will tell us why this happened and if this is a very rare exception”.

The outage tripped a lot of fire alarms throughout the region and had the Prince George fire department racing off to all sorts of  calls.  There were concerns  of "flames" at the Husky Refinery, but turns out that when power is lost, the refinery  has a  special "venting" procedure.  The  procedure is normal  under the circumstances.