Thousands without power amid B.C. snowstorm

Tens of thousands of homes and businesses in British Columbia were without electricity Wednesday morning as a heavy snowstorm downed trees and transmission lines across the province.

Approximately 30,000 BC Hydro customers were in the dark before 10:30 a.m., with Metro Vancouver, Vancouver Island and Squamish absorbing the brunt of the damage to the electrical grid.

The largest outages in the island region saw more than 10,000 customers without electricity in Greater Victoria, Nanaimo, Sooke and the southern Gulf Islands.

On the B.C. mainland, approximately 19,500 residents and businesses were without power at the storm's peak, with major blackouts reported in Squamish, West Vancouver, Richmond, Burnaby, New Westminster and Coquitlam.

The B.C. Interior and northern regions avoided major storm damage to power transmission lines, according to BC Hydro.

While hydro crews were out in force all morning restoring power to the hardest-hit regions, approximately 11,000 customers in the Lower Mainland and 8,000 customers on Vancouver Island remained without power into the afternoon.

By Wednesday evening, just over 900 customers were left without power in the Vancouver Island region—the vast majority of remaining outages on the Gulf Islands.

Just before 4:30 p.m., the utility said in an update that around 500 customers on the Gulf Islands will be without power overnight “due to access challenges and hazardous conditions.” BC Hydro said it would have crews brought in on the first ferries of the morning to bring power back.

On the mainland, the number of customers without electricity dipped in the afternoon, but by the evening had climbed back up to more than 12,000. New outages included approximately 5,000 customers in the dark in Richmond, just over 4,000 in Coquitlam and around 1,500 in the University of British Columbia area. 

The blackouts came mere days after the power provider announced it had met record-breaking demand for electricity across the province during a weekend cold spell.

The utility said peak hourly demand for hydro in B.C. climbed to 11,300 megawatts on Friday evening, beating the province’s previous record of 10,977 megawatts, set in December 2022.

"B.C. is fortunate to have an integrated, provincial hydroelectric system that allows BC Hydro to ramp up quickly when generation is needed and scale back when it is not,” BC Hydro president Chris O'Riley said in a Sunday news release.

"Our teams carefully plan and prepare for cold weather events like this to ensure our generating facilities are running at full capacity so we can deliver clean electricity to our customers when they need it the most."

With files from CTV News Vancouver’s Kaija Jussinoja