Despite the fact that half of the province escaped much of the bad weather, households across South West Nova Scotia experienced power outages.
At its peak 250,000 households – about half of Nova Scotia Power’s customers – were in the dark.
Tiffany Chase with Nova Scotia Power says that was due to damage to several major transmission lines during heavy snowfall last night and this morning.
One of the transmission lines sends power from Cape Breton to mainland Nova Scotia.
“Because of that transmission interruption, protection devices that are on our system went into effect because we weren’t able to supply enough electricity for all of the customers that were drawing on our system,” says Chase.
Similar protective devices were triggered when a transmission outage occurred on the border in New Brunswick, shutting down the link between the two provinces.
“Those protections are in place for a reason, so there isn’t damage to our system.”
The outage reached all the way down to Yarmouth and at one point, nearly all of Lunenburg County was without power.
Around 500 employees were working on restoration efforts today.
Between noon and 4 p.m. 200,000 customers had their power restored.
Story by Brittany Wentzell
Twitter: @BrittWentzell
Email: wentzell.brittany@radioabl.ca
