Nearly 30,000 Without Power After April Snow

Nearly 30,000 BC Hydro customers north of Nanaimo were without power for several hours Sunday morning as crews dealt with the effects of a rare April snow storm, causing a tree to fall on a transmission line.

Nearly 30,000 BC Hydro customers north of Nanaimo were without power for several hours Sunday morning as crews dealt with the effects of a rare April snow storm, causing a tree to fall on a transmission line.

Roughly 40,000 customers were affected by the initial outage, but crews were able to quickly reroute transmission to restore some power.

As of noon, the power company's online outage list showed more than 28,000 customers in Parksville and Qualicum Beach without power, with most of the outages attributed to a "transmission circuit failure".

The causes of other outages included downed wires and trees, and two incidents were blamed simply on the snow.

As of 4 p.m., BC Hydro’s online outage list showed slightly fewer than 1,100 customers affected by outages in the region.