HALIFAX — Tens of thousands of homes and businesses lost power in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia on Tuesday after strong winds struck Canada's East Coast, and officials warned electricity restoration could take days in some areas.
It is the second time in a week that damaging gusts have pulled down power lines across the Maritimes — the latest coming just a week before Christmas, creating worries about travel and family gatherings.
"It's too early to provide a specific time frame (for restoration) … New Brunswickers need to be prepared for prolonged outages," Nicole Poirier, vice-president of operations at NB Power, told a news conference.
Kris Austin, the province's minister of public safety, said, "There's lots of damage and many parts of the province affected. That's why this will not be a one-day event."
Poirier said there's also been damage to New Brunswick's transmission network, adding that a special team was looking into how to repair it.
Kyle Leavitt, director of New Brunswick Emergency Measures Organization, said some roads are impassable and many buildings have been damaged. "The impact is extensive but I'm not aware of any injuries," he said.
He told an afternoon news conference that the Charlotte County Hospital in St. Stephen was using a generator as efforts continued to restore power.
At about 4 p.m. local time, there were 77,000 customers in New Brunswick without power, and 24,000 without power in Nova Scotia. Electricity had been restored to most customers in Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland.
Early on Tuesday morning, at the height of the blackouts, 173,000 customers across the Atlantic region were without power. Wind speeds reached over 100 kilometres per hour in some locations, such as Eskasoni First Nation in Cape Breton and Greenwood, N.S., but the strongest winds in most parts of the province were more in the range of 80 to 90 km/h.
"The gusts in most areas of the province were up to high 80s and into the 90s" at the peak, said Ian Hubbard, an Environment Canada forecaster.
However, in Halifax the winds were lighter, with gusts staying at less than 70 km/h in more sheltered areas, according to Environment Canada data.
The storm was the result of a low-pressure system meeting a massive high-pressure system in the Atlantic Ocean, which created a slow-moving storm with strong winds.
David Coon, the leader of the Green Party in New Brunswick, said some of the damage to the province's power system could have been avoided had the utility, over the years, done a better job maintaining the network by burying power lines or trimming trees.
In an interview Tuesday, he said that due to political interference — when past governments have limited unpopular rate increases — the New Brunswick utility hasn't made necessary investments to make its grid more resilient.
"No one has been charged with taking that big look at the situation and recommending to government and the premier what needs to be done," he said. "We are not ready for climate change."
Asked about the reason for the widespread outages in New Brunswick, Poirier said it was mainly due to "damage related to trees" falling on lines.
Nova Scotia Power said in a release on Tuesday that it was "working as safely and as quickly as possible to get the lights back on.”
In August, Nova Scotia’s privately owned electric utility was fined $750,000 for failing to meet 2022 performance targets set by the provincial regulator. The Nova Scotia Utility and Review Board said Nova Scotia Power Inc. had increased investments in transmission infrastructure to deal with increasingly powerful storms but had failed to achieve certain reliability targets in each year since the standards were established in 2016.
However, Matt Drover, manager of storm response at Nova Scotia Power, said in an interview Tuesday that the utility has invested more than $32 million in tree cutting and trimming this year and that the work has been making a difference. It was the prolonged exposure to winds in the latest storm, he said, that caused trees to knock out customers' power.
"This is a 36-hour storm that won't leave the province," Drover said. "It's been hovering over there and those winds have been battering trees for that entire time and eventually those trees just fall on the power line."
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 19, 2023.
Michael Tutton, The Canadian Press
