Near-record gusts knock out power to 150K Vancouver Island customers; BC Hydro brings in reinforcements from mainland

The clean up was well underway Wednesday on Vancouver Island after a night of chaos.

In East Sooke, where a massive tree toppled onto a home, a crane was brought in to help with removal.

Tuesday night’s bomb cyclone left a path of destruction in its wake across Vancouver Island. Winds gusting up to 170 kilometres per hour off the north coast of the island knocked trees down across roads, snapping power lines and creating havoc on highways.

The fierce wind lifted and tossed a small aircraft off the Courtenay airstrip like a toy plane, and sent large branches flying, shutting down Highway 4, where traffic was backed up Wednesday morning, cutting off communities like Port Alberni from the rest of Vancouver Island.

Meanwhile, old growth trees that fell near Tofino left folks there stranded overnight.

“(It) basically cut Tofino in half on the highway so people couldn’t get through, either (way) to get home last night," recounted Tofino Mayor Dan Law on Wednesday.

"Some had to walk around and some crawled around through the bush and some people slept in their trucks."

At its peak, the bomb cyclone left 150,000 homes on Vancouver Island dark, according to BC Hydro’s Ted Olynk.

“From Port Renfrew to Port Hardy, it hit basically every community on the Island,” Olynk said. “We had crews working through the night. We had brought crews in from the mainland before the storm hit.”

A fleet of BC Hydro trucks boarded BC Ferries to help restore power to the remaining 75,000 homes still without power, a task predicted to take days.

Winds were still strong in Victoria by midday, but dissipating – a reprieve before another storm was expected to blast the region on Friday morning.

"(It will be) similar to what we just saw," predicted Armel Castellan of Environment and Climate Change Canada.

"Right now, we are just tabulating how strong those winds will be."