BC Hydro says “substation faults” are to blame for outages that left thousands of South Surrey residents without power for random periods of time over the weekend.
According to an update posted to the utility’s website Monday morning, repeated outages experienced by some customers were due to faults at the substation located near 152 Street and 32 Avenue.
“Crews have been working on isolating the problems and we are transferring circuits that supply these customers to other nearby substations in order to minimize the impact over the next few days,” the statement explains.
According to a list of restored outages, more than 16,000 customers were affected by intermittent power loss on Aug. 10 and Aug. 11, in areas including Rosemary Heights and south of the Semiahmoo Trail.
Crews are en route to an outage in #SurreyBC #WhiteRock affecting around 10,000 customers caused by a substation fault. They expect to arrive around 1:15pm and we’ll have updates on our mobile site: https://t.co/l5gTD0IhO7 pic.twitter.com/i73KRlopFJ
— BC Hydro (@bchydro) August 11, 2019
We’re aware of another outage in the #SurreyBC #WhiteRock area and crews will be responding and investigating. Power is currently out to just under 10,000 customers. As info is available, we’ll have updates on our mobile site: https://t.co/8XLdphy74B pic.twitter.com/oDWFbtUfrG
— BC Hydro (@bchydro) August 12, 2019
The biggest pocket of customers were in an area bounded by 176 Street, 32A Avenue, 20 Avenue and 152 Street. The outages lasted between 10 minutes and three hours.