Downtown Prince George went dark in some sectors on Wednesday morning. The high winds were the cause.
"This was an unplanned, or a forced outage, due to winds that caused some of our power lines to touch together. It's called a phase to phase fault," said Bob Gammer, BC Hydro spokesman.
"We had other areas affected as well. We had just under 600 customers in total without power for the same reason, the strong winds."
The biggest affected area was the downtown core, shutting the lights out on 450 billing points, but on a regular business day in a commercial district that meant exponentially more people were impacted in some way.
"Affecting downtown like it did, it is certainly a high profile outage because it affects a lot of businesses," Gammer said. "It certainly impacted the workday for a lot of people in Prince George. You can't say it is a small outage because for anyone caught in it, it has an impact and we are working as hard as we can to clear that up."
The power went out in downtown at about 9:45 a.m. and was several hours in the repair stage. BC Hydro crews estimated they should be done restoring all power by about 1:30.
