Some 9,000 customers north of the Nechako River will be without power Monday afternoon as BC Hydro conducts emergency repairs.
The work begins at 1:30 and should take about 2 1/2 hours. It will affect both residential and commercial customers in the North Nechako, Hart Highway, Hart Highlands, Chief Lake and Ness Lake areas.
Hydro spokesman Bob Gammer said the service must be shut down so a crew can replace a broken crossarm on a pole holding a line to the Chief Lake substation, which in turn, feeds 9,000 customers.
It's not known how the crossarm was broken.
"It could've been wear and tear over many years," Gammer said. "It's a wooden structure."
Because of the conditions, Gammer said it's not safe to do the repair while the line is still alive. A notice on the Hydro website and a callout to local media this morning was all the heads up that was given.
"We want people to have as much notice as possible but when we have an emergency situation, it's better that we deal with it right away, even if that means very little notice to people," Gammer said.
"If we were leave the equipment to fail, then we would be in a situation where we don't have control.
"As you can imagine, it might happen in the middle of the night, conditions might be poor for us to repair, it's going to take longer for us to mobilize, to find the problem, fix the problem.
"And so, when we can deal with the problem and fix the problem under daylight hours, when we can control the situation, we can minimize the amount of time that the customer is inconvenienced with this outage."
