About 300 homes and businesses still without power as restoration efforts continue

It's been five days since a major windstorm hit the province and about 300 customers are still without power as restoration efforts continue.

More than half of the affected homes and businesses are in the Carleton York Sunbury area.

"If all goes very [well] this evening we hope less than 50 customers would be left to finish tomorrow," said Marc Belliveau, spokesperson for NB Power. 

"Our strategy now is to attempt to reach the longest outages [those who have been out since Saturday]."

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The strong winds on Saturday night knocked out power to roughly 100,000 customers across the province.

Jen Hudson, who lives in Mundleville, a local service district south of Rexton, is one of them.

Hudson has been without power since Saturday night after a large tree fell on the power line next to her house.

"Came home to the dark and we've been there ever since," she said.

Other than having to play a lot of board games and read a lot of books, it's really not that bad, however I am looking forward to showering in my own home.-Jen Hudson, Mundleville resident 

But the local resident said she's been through outages many times before and is well prepared with a wood stove and a lot of extra water on hand. 

She said the number of outages — including the outages in the January ice storm of 2017 — has taught her a lot over the years and this one is no different.

"Other than having to play a lot of board games and read a lot of books, it's really not that bad, however I am looking forward to showering in my own home," she said.

"I'm really hoping today's the day [NB Power crews] get to mine," she said.

The utility said about 300 crews from New Brunswick and outside the province are working to restore power on Thursday.

"In locations where the outages have been restored, the crews have been moved to areas that still have outages," said Belliveau.

NB Power expected most of the power outages to be restored Wednesday night. 

The utility has said a few rural areas wouldn't get power back until Thursday, because power lines are in areas that are harder for crews to access.

Belliveau said a weather system that happened overnight on Tuesday, also impacted an additional 1,000 NB Power customers that weren't initially affected by weekend outages.

"Trees that may have been laying on wires in remote areas that weren't shorting out the lines, finally did short out the lines," he said.

"Or in some cases trees or branches that had been hanging near the lines and damaged since Saturday, finally toppled onto the lines."