Wildlife, branches and equipment failures are among the causes of what appears to be a higher-than-normal number of power outages in New Westminster in 2019.
Statistics provided to the Record by the city’s electrical utility indicate there were 35 outages between Jan. 4 and Nov. 22, including some on the same day.
New Westminster, which operates its own electrical utility, is a city that’s long prided itself on having fewer power outages than other municipalities.
“I continue to hear from our customers that they are so happy because they very rarely see an outage,” said Rod Carle, general manager of the electrical utility.
While Carle senses there have been more power outages in 2019 than in past years, he doesn’t have the data at this time to confirm his suspicions.
“The only way to trend it really is probably to look at a three- to five-year trend,” he said. “After the new year, when things slow down a bit, I could get some of our admin staff to go through and come up with a comparison to this year.”
Still, Carle believes 2019 has been “somewhat more unusual” than previous years.
“When I look at the causes and the percentages, 63 per cent is roughly from equipment failure, but they are all various types – connectors seem to be fairly high. The others are not too out of line,” he said. “Overall, the bigger picture is that we have experienced more problems in 2019.”
Carle said the city has a robust process in place to test poles, trim trees and take other actions aimed at preventing power outages.
“We have probably one of the most rigorous maintenance plans that I have seen,” he said. “A lot of our time is spent on maintenance. We have a whole list of activities in our maintenance management plan that we go through. I try and track to see what percentage is actually completed – usually we are up in the 80 per cent or 85 per cent in an entire year’s plan.”
Of the 35 power outages that occurred in New West from January to November, 22 were caused by equipment failure, nine by wildlife and four by storm. Equipment failures included a variety of issues, including damage by third party, cables and connectors, pole damage by a motor vehicle accident, transformers, blown fuses and wire theft.
On the wildlife front, a variety of critters caused the power to go out in New Westminster – including racoons in the substation, birds and squirrels in cut-outs, and squirrels damaging high-voltage cables.
“It’s pretty easy to spot – if there’s a crow at the bottom of a high-voltage switch in the substation, that’s probably what caused it,” Carle said.
This year’s outages occurred in all parts of the city, from Queensborough to Sapperton. In the vast majority of cases (20), power was restored within two hours but there were five occasions when outages lasted two to three hours and six occasions when power was out for three to five hours.
The longest outages were: a five-hour-and-15-minute outage on June 19 caused by equipment failure resulting from wire theft; a nine-hour-and-45-minute outage on Oct. 22 caused by a squirrel-damaged high-voltage cable, a nine-hour-and-30-minute outage on Nov. 14 caused by an equipment failure due to a high-voltage cable splice. The longest outage was on May 29, when an equipment failure in a high-voltage underground cable knocked out power for 23 hours and 30 minutes.
In some cases, residents were none too happy about being without power. During the May 29 power outage, many residents took to social media to voice concerns about the outage and the lack of information they were getting from the city about when power would be restored.
“The fact that this is the first update in over two hours and that we can’t get through to anyone at the city is a good test for disaster preparedness,” Liz Iseli tweeted. “Time to make process changes to improve communication and response times.”
Those sentiments were echoed in a tweet by Val Bishop, who suggested the City of New Westminster should have a recorded message on its after-hours outage line to let people know the city is aware of the outage and is working on it. She said residents were “in the dark” on two accounts – they had no lights and they didn’t know if the city was even aware of the power outage.
Some were sympathetic to the city’s efforts to restore power.
“Hey… I have lived in New West for 22 years. Power has gone out on me three times. Damn good job boys!” tweeted Jay Dubya.
In response to complaints about poor communication during power outages, the city introduced new communications protocols in June to improve the way information about power outages is communicated via social media. In December, the city unveiled a new 24-7 number (604-239-6100) that people can now call to report power outages and to get regular updates on the status of outages.
