As the North Thompson Valley — from Barriere to Blue River — awaits a planned power outage by BC Hydro this weekend, the Mayor of Clearwater is warning his community to be prepared for the worst.

“People need to start thinking now about filling up reservoirs, whether it be the bath tub or all your drinking water bottle and things like that for a 12 hour outage,” pleaded Mayor Merlin Blackwell.  “Finding a way to secure… maybe put some extra ice in your fridges and things like that.”

The cautionary suggestion comes as BC Hydro intends to cut power to communities through the North Thompson Valley, from Barriere to Vavenby, on Sunday for a planned, 12 hour maintenance session on the lone transmission line which supplies power to the region.

In the aftermath of a previous planned power outage in late August, Blackwell says the District of Clearwater has taken advanced steps to ensure the municipal reservoir can remain functional.

“We have two back-up generators that are currently being installed. That may be able to keep us alive for fire flow and and for water to houses,” said Blackwell.  “Honestly, I don’t think we’ll know that until we get to the point of the outage.”

The apprehension follows a scheduled power outage on August 21st, which was originally scheduled to last for 6 hours in the evening and early into August 22nd.

At that time, BC Hydro crews discovered they were unable to reach the repair site, prompting the utility to call back its personnel for the evening for safety reasons as they awaited additional crews to come in to plow a road to get to the location where the work was to take place.

Despite this, the power to the region was cut off as scheduled, and stayed off until the repair work had been completed the next day, some 20 hours later.

Blackwell says he wasn’t informed of the situation until about 12 hours into the power shutdown, which he said didn’t give the municipality time enough to inform residents of the need to restrict water, as the local reservoir in Clearwater is fed through an electric pumping system.

The District was eventually forced to pay to have emergency water supplies brought in by truck — a cost Blackwell says will not be reimbursed by BC Hydro.

In the fallout from that day, Blackwell does say BC Hydro has been much more proactive in its level of communication with the District.

“That is a dramatic improvement. I think that BC Hydro knows that the spotlight will be on them to pull this [next outage on Sunday] off smoothly,” said Blackwell.  “I think they will have everything in place to do that.”

“That said, there’s always the unexpected.”