The Mayor of Clearwater says the almost 24-hour long power outage last week was a great learning experience for his community.
Speaking on NL Newsday, Merlin Blackwell, says he thinks it will lead to discussions about investing in more resilient infrastructure.
“We are so spread out that hooking into the grid or even the District of Clearwater hooking up all its satellite operations, pump stations, well-heads, and things like that will be a monumental task,” he said.
“We as an organization and again as a town are going to start having these conversations about what key areas we would do power backup in the event of a future emergency like this.”
BC Hydro says a transmission circuit failure led to the outage, which affected close to 10,000 customers at one point, from just north of Kamloops to as far away as Valemount.
“We’ve taking a lot of lessons, testing a lot of systems and routines here and we’re writing it all down to prepare for something like what happened last summer,” Blackwell added.
“We’ve got a fairly simple incident here that is triggering a lot of stuff here for us to get prepared for in the event we have an Ashcroft, or a Spences or a Lytton situation.”
But he also says to – essentially – blame the weather for the outage.
“My understanding is that there was a heck of a sideways windstorm with sleet, hail, rain that went through sort of Barriere to Little Fort, maybe a little bit south of that, across the Cariboo into maybe Agate Bay and area,” Blackwell said. “It was fairly strong and with all the winter damage to trees and things like that, its not surprising that something would have come down on a power line in a few places.”
“[BC Hydro] had some sort of structural failure either a set of power poles or maybe a tower somewhere south-southwest of Little Fort.”
That lack of power also meant a number of businesses in Clearwater were forced to stay closed because of the lack of suitable backup generators.
“We’ve got three backup generators [at our water plant]. They do some basic functions and put a little bit into the reservoir but we’ve got a lot of demand up here between the residents and the camp,” he said. “There are a lot of toilets to flush.”
