In what could be regarded as some short-term pain for some long-term gain, nearly 2,800 customers will be without electricity early Sunday morning so BC Hydro can make some improvements to a substation.
Power will be out from 1 a.m. to 9 a.m. and the area affected covers Chief Lake and Ness Lake roads and all their side roads as well as Highway 97 and its side roads from Chief Lake Road north to Salmon Valley.
"We're doing work inside the Chief Lake substation to improve our reliability and also flexibility for switching in the case when we might have some kind of equipment-related power outage issue," Hydro spokesman Bob Gammer said.
"If it was a problem in the substation, we could switch around that equipment and power up a line and get customers on faster."
Gammer said the work will wrap up a project that's been going on for some time.
"We certainly always appreciate people's patience while we're working through system improvement projects and the inconvenience that outages cause," Gammer said. "We're asking people to bear with us one more time."
Gammer said he also hopes people appreciate that the outage will be worthwhile.
"It will mean better reliability for all the customers that are fed from the circuits that come out of that substation," he said.
