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High winds batter Shuswap

A vicious low-pressure system howled into the Shuswap Saturday night, gusting to 74 km/h and knocking out power to about 8,000 homes.
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Damage: This tree near McGuire Lake was split in two by Saturday’s windstorm.

A vicious low-pressure system howled into the Shuswap Saturday night, gusting to 74 km/h and knocking out power to about 8,000 homes.

While some small outages were noted around 8:46 p.m., BC Hydro recorded major outages at 10 p.m. in the North Shuswap, 10:22 south of First Nations Road, with the biggest at 10:27 east of Anglemont and north of Trans-Canada that killed the power to 3,786 customers and another north of Ford Road at 11:27 that cut power to 3,181 customers.

“They were cascading, multiple outages,” says BC Hydro communications rep Gene Bryant. “In the North Shuswap, they had three separate outages. As soon as we got something fixed, something else would fail.”

Environment Canada warning preparedness meteorologist Doug Lundquist says the storm was first forecast Friday with sustained winds expected to be in the neighbourhood of 30 km/h.

“When we forecast 30 km/h from the southwest in the Shuswap, it’s pretty irregular because it’s such a calm area,” he says. “That’s already a heads-up for me.”

What wasn’t mentioned was the strength of the gusts, and although 74 km/h was the recorded speed at Environment Canada’s weather station near the lake, Lundquist says stronger gusts could have been possible elsewhere.

He says the storm tracked west to east, just north of the Shuswap and closer than the normal storm trajectory.

Bryant meanwhile, says there were many “under-20 power outages” to small grids such as blocks of homes, most of them a result of trees touching the wires.

Customers who were without power for many hours were probably victims of these small power outages earlier in the evening, compounded by breaks in the bigger system later on.

“It’s like the old holes in the water hose, there’s no point fixing the end of the line until the larger holes at the top are fixed,” he says, of the need to repair the larger system first before tackling smaller feeder lines.

Bryant says power was restored to all customers by Sunday and that BC Hydro is spending unprecedented capital dollars on improving and replacing infrastructure, something that will leave customers from the west end of Foothills Road to Highway 97A, and all feeder roads, without power Friday, Feb. 19 from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.

“It means more planned outages for everybody, but the good news is things are being repaired and replaced,” he says.

“Some of this stuff has been around for 50 years or more and the infrastructure has reached the end of its operating life.”