Just when we thought we were out of the woods, heavy winds started blowing the trees down.
What was supposed to be the tail end of a storm week ended up creating a blustery mess across North Vancouver and West Vancouver Thursday night.
"For four hours, right across the North Shore, all the crews were busy with dealing with wind-related hazards," said Mike Cairns, assistant chief with District of North Vancouver Fire and Rescue Services. "From 8 p.m. to midnight, I think there was close to 50 calls across the North Shore from medical aid calls to downed power lines and trees across roads and transformers blowing. We had multiple areas of power outage."
BC Hydro was tasked with restoring power to close to 3,000 properties in North Vancouver and West Vancouver, most of them due to branches coming down on wires.
At one point in the night, a tree blew down across the Stanley Park Causeway resulting in the Lions Gate Bridge being closed. West Vancouver police took to social media, encouraging people to stay home if possible.
Though there was plenty of concern from municipal staff that the storm might result in flooding, the North Shore generally "got off lucky" in the words of West Vancouver fire chief Martin Ernst.
The Village of Lions Bay, however, remained in a water crisis as of Friday afternoon. Landslides badly damaged one of the small municipality's water intakes and reduced the other one to steady but reduced capacity.
Residents have been under a boil water notice and strict water conservation orders from Vancouver Coastal Health since Wednesday.
"Resident compliance with water restrictions will be absolutely critical into
the weekend. Use only what water is absolutely necessary," a recorded message posted by village staff stated on Friday afternoon.
Despite the overall nastiness, there weren't any local weather records set. West Vancouver accumulated 123 millimetres of rain since Monday, which is a lot but doesn't meet the threshold for a rainfall warning, according to Environment Canada.
"I think the thing that jumps out at me is not that any one storm was a record... What really stands out to me is there were three storms," said Doug Lundquist, Environment Canada meteorologist. "From Monday until early (Friday), there were three storms and each one gave an incredible amount of impact. A lot of rain. A lot of wind and it was just one after the other."
