Vancouver Island and Lower Mainland residents are gradually reconnecting to the grid after a storm that is believed to have caused the single largest outage in BC Hydro’s history.
The weekend windstorm brought winds of up to 90 kilometres an hour throughout the region, cancelling ferries, delaying Vancouver’s SkyTrain, crushing cars and ripping down trees and power lines alike.
The City of Vancouver estimates more than 500 street and park trees came down during the storm. The city's park board urban forest team has been working to clean up damage, debris and downed trees and is currently concentrating on those which fell on houses and cars and are blocking secondary roads and bike lanes.
Insurance firm ICBC has received more than 4,000 calls and online claims over the weekend related to the storm.
BC Hydro estimated that 710,000 people, or 50 per cent of its 1.4 million customers, lost power.
At the peak, 400,000 customers lost power compared to 240,000 during a storm in 2006.
Since Saturday the utility and its contract crews have been dealing with 1,800 trouble calls related to the storm. Typically, BC Hydro crews respond to about 2,000 such calls a month across the province.
As of Tuesday afternoon, some 3,500 people remained without power.
Saturated soil in some areas slowed repairs, making it unsafe for crews to use heavy equipment for repairs.
The Lower Mainland has experienced previous wild and windy weather, most notably in 2012 when a week of snow and rain combined with high winds took down 200 trees in Pacific Spirit Park; and in 2006, when a violent wind storm tore down some 10,000 trees.
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