It was a dark and stormy night.
Particularly if you were on of the 23,000 North Shore residents who lost power in Tuesday’s 90-kilometre per hour gusts of wind.
Around 5:30 p.m., several explosions could be seen lighting up the North Shore sky above BC Hydro’s Capilano substation.
“A tree came down on top of one of our transmission structures. It knocked the top of that structure off and damaged three transmission lines that were attached to it,” said Hydro spokeswoman Mora Scott. “Crews had to fix those three lines as well as make repairs to the structure before they could get the customers back on.”
That took about 24 hours. By 5 p.m. on Wednesday, only 600 properties remained in the dark.
Scott said the utility spends $50 million per year on managing trees and brush that threaten powerlines.
“We try to trim all trees and get rid of any diseased or dead trees, but even sometimes healthy trees, depending on the direction of the wind and type of the weather, they can come down on our lines.”
At the storm’s peak more than 110,000 customers in B.C. were without power.
The outage closed more than a dozen elementary and secondary schools in North Vancouver for the day.
Before the winds even kicked up, heavy rain from the previous days was doing some damage on the North Shore. The District of West Vancouver has closed off the popular Millstream Trail on Hollyburn Mountain after a substantial landslide near McDonald Creek.
“It’s quite a big slide,” said Jeff McDonald, district spokesman. “Bigger than the one we had last year on the Trans Canada trail.”
Staff are now looking into how to remediate the trail, along with the landowner, British Pacific Properties. There is no timeline for when the trail may be reopened, McDonald said.
