Three schools are closed as as many as 1,900 customers in the west bowl area were without power when an outage struck shortly before 8 a.m. Tuesday.
Foothills and Heritage elementary schools and D.P. Todd secondary school will be closed until at least noon, school district human resources officer Lori MacIver said in an e-mail.
"Foothills Elementary does have power, however, it remains closed until 12:45 p.m. Heritage Elementary and DP Todd Secondary remain closed until further notice," MacIver said in a second e-mail sent out later this morning.
By shortly after 9 a.m., total customers affected was reduced to about 1,500.
"We've done some switching in the affected area to get 400 customers back on," BC Hydro spokesman Bob Gammer said.
Blown fuses were found in a kiosk, one of the metal boxes Hydro has stationed around town but Gammer said the exact cause is still to be determined and did not rule out this morning's heavy snowfall as the culprit.
"We still continue to troubleshoot," he said. "Right now, we're holding with our restoration time estimate of about 11 this morning but that may change once we discover what the problem is and know how much time it's going to take to effect repairs," he said.
The area specifically affected is bounded by Foothills Boulevard to the west, Trader Crescent to the east, Clare Crescent to the north and Bowron Crescent to the south.
A further 15 customers in 1900 block First Avenue were hit at about 10:45 a.m. and power there was expected to be restored by 1:30 p.m.
