Those howling winds over the last several days have been pretty hard to ignore - especially if you're a BC Hydro worker.
Since late Thursday morning there have been more than 40 outages caused by either wind storms or trees down across power lines, according to the Crown corporation's website, as fall arrived with a series of storm systems delivering gusts of up to 72 kilometres per hour.
Most of the outages affected five or fewer homes and almost all in areas outside of the city.
That's a common pattern, said Hydro spokesman Bob Gammer.
"They tend [occur in rural areas] more so because they are less built up," Gammer said. "There are more trees. We're talking about long circuits where the powerlines are going off to smaller neighbourhoods."
Gammer said the Crown corporation continues to maintain a "vegetation management program" where trees along power lines are removed and encouraged customers to do the same on their properties.
By late Tuesday afternoon the list of ongoing outages was cleared and Environment Canada meteorologist Jim Steele said the weather will deliver some relief.
"There have been a number of storms moving onto the coast and affecting the north central interior," Steele said.
"It was a very active fall pattern last week, with the last big one coming through [Monday] and then it looks like a bit of a quieter period as this storm system weakens and then it looks like things should settle down for a few days at least."
But the most recent events could only be a taste of things to come.
"It's fall," Steele said. "We get the official arrival of fall and here comes the fall storms onto the north coast."
When the first genuine snowfall of the 2010-11 winter struck last November, it was accompanied by a howling, swirling wind that knocked out power some 9,000 homes in Prince George, most of them north of the Nechako River, and closed Nukko Lake elementary school for a day.
Hydro currently relies on calls from customers to know where there is an outage but once the smart meters are installed, notification will be automatic, Gammer said.
"There is no big board in the control center with flashing red lights saying that we've got customers without power," Gammer said. "Right now, without smart meters, we must hear from individual customers. They must call us to let us that they're without power."
Crews are always ready to respond once word is received, he added.
"We are prepared in that we have our staff ready to go to respond to power outages 24 hours a day, seven days a week."
