Oct. 12 update: Fuel began flowing to industrial customers Thursday night, including some residential high-rises such as Langara Gardens in Vancouver.
Hundreds of residents at a Vancouver apartment complex will soon find themselves without heat or hot water after a pipeline explosion in B.C.'s Interior that put two natural gas lines out of commission earlier this week.
"Effective immediately, you are being curtailed to zero," FortisBC said a letter to the management for Langara Gardens Wednesday, leaving more than 1,000 residents in the complex's 605 units with no way of heating their homes.
"You don't get any heat—that's it—or hot water," resident Fin Russell told CTV News.
Located on West 57th Avenue near Cambie Street, Langara Gardens is one of 200 large industrial customers that have been forced to shut off their natural gas.
"We had curtailed service or shut off service to a lot of industrial customers, so they come off first," FortisBC spokesperson Doug Stout said. "We keep homes and small business on the longest if we have outages."
The news comes after a 900 PSI natural gas line operated by Enbridge ruptured north of Prince George Tuesday, sending a large ball of flames into the air.
That pipeline as well as a neighbouring gas line had to be shut off while crews work to repair the rupture.
The neighbouring line was put back online Thursday morning, but that hasn't solved the shortage.
"Obviously, we had gas flowing into two large pipelines that were operating at full capacity before the rupture," Stout said. "We're going to be at less than half of that volume, so obviously there's still a shortage of gas to go around."
Fortis is asking every natural gas customer in the province to cut back on their consumption wherever possible.
North Vancouver schools, for example, are turning down their thermostats and encouraging students to wear sweaters to class.
"It may not seem like much, but every little bit helps to go around," Stout said.
Residents at Langara Towers, meanwhile, say they're thankful for the sunny weather, which is helping keep their units a little warmer amid the outage.
"So far, we're OK—the weather being so nice," Dennis Hougham, another resident, said.
With files from CTV Vancouver Shannon Paterson