The Village of Port Alice will now be included in the all-day power outage scheduled for the entire North Island on Sunday, May 25 from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Originally the village was going to be powered by generators during the May 25 outage, but BC Hydro noted in a video that due to the "grounding levels" not being acceptable enough for them to connect the generators in time, Port Alice will be without power all day along with the rest of the North Island.
"No doubt this has been confusing, and we apologize for the grief," stated BC Hydro. "Thank you for your patience."
BC Hydro has scheduled upgrade work expected to affect all communities from Woss north so crews can deal with an aging, end-of-life transmission structure in between Woss and the Keogh substation.
BC Hydro spokesperson Karla Louwers noted earlier this month that BC Hydro will be sending crews out to various areas of the North Island in order to help minimize the impact to customers.
"We will be doing other work as well," she said, stating residents will likely see BC Hydro crews working on not just different components of the electrical system, but also completing vegetation management to ensure the lines stay clear in the future.
"We recognize that there's never a good time for an outage, and we want to thank our customers for their patience and understanding while we complete this work," Louwers added. "We have hosted these outages for several years now around this weekend, and the reason we do it is to maintain reliability to the North Island by targeting those structures that are end of life or nearing end of life."
