If you rely on having electricity, be forewarned that you’ll have to find some alternative source for Wednesday, July 16, from about 8 am to about 6 pm.
The power outage will impact most everyone in town (including the heavy industrial park and airport).
According to BC Hydro, the main reason behind this outage is “maintenance tasks including inspections and testing of equipment within the Meikle substation,” says BC Hydro Communications. “This work focuses on system reliability, helping avoid unplanned outages down the road.”
However, that’s not all that’s happening. “We are taking full advantage of this outage to perform as much work as we can while trying to minimize the inconvenience to the community now and into the immediate future by avoiding subsequent planned outages. While the work is being done within the Meikle substation, we will have our line crews performing tasks in various locations outside the station, such as replacing a voltage transformer, which would require outages of their own but are captured under this larger outage.
“We appreciate everyone’s patience and understanding as crews work to perform these necessary tasks as quickly as can be accomplished, safely.”
Many people will use generators to provide power to their fridge and freezer during this time. Some might decide to power their entire house with a generator. Note that, if you want to power your whole house, you should have a transfer switch.
A transfer switch allows you to switch between power sources and isolates your house from the network while it is running off a generator. This prevents your generator from back feeding along the power lines and electrocuting the technicians, which would be a bad thing.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
