Maritime Electric crews have managed to restore power to the majority of customers who were without because of yesterday’s storm, with about 6,800 customers (as of 5 p.m. on Friday) left to go.
A message on the utility's website states: "Based on Operations assessments, restoration will be into Sunday due to the extent of the damage caused by the storm."
Kim Griffin with Maritime Electric said they are now into the difficult part.
During the storm, crews were focused on fixing the major repairs to the transmission, which was able to give power back to a large number of customers, she said.
“The storm is ended, but now we’re into the smaller outages now that we have all the transmission fixed, have the transmission customers on,” she said. “For us, these are the pretty complex ones, too. They’re smaller in number, but they are more complex.”
There are currently scattered outages across the province, but Griffin said up west is a bit messier, with downed trees and downed polls.
“We’re actually going to be moving our timeline for restoration efforts into Saturday, so we’re at the point now where we are reaching out to some municipalities to see if they’re going to be able to stay open once we have an assessment this afternoon.”
More crews are due to arrive from Ontario and New Brunswick this afternoon to provide assistance, she said.
“As soon as they get here, we’ll be doing training and safety reviews with them and then getting them out in the field working with our crews.”
Griffin said she’s happy the weather has improved today.
“It’s been a really intense storm, and today we didn’t have the winds that we had yesterday and last night and the heavy wet snow, so at least the working and driving conditions have certainly improved.”
The Guardian will update this story as more information is made available.
Maritime Electric's contact centre is open and available by calling 1-800-670-1012 and updates can be found online.
