Arthur damage linked to new outages in Nova Scotia

Nova Scotians can expect more power outages blamed on post tropical storm Arthur as damaged trees continue to fall.

Early Thursday morning, close to 900 customers in Barrington, along the south shore and Bridgetown, in the Annapolis Valley, lost electricity.

Nova Scotia Power spokesman David Rhodenizer described it as some of the after effects of Arthur.

“Damaged trees that have fallen in the lines,” he says. “That part of the province had some strong winds overnight and this morning. Certainly not tropical storm strength, but 50 to 60 km an hour. Strong enough for those storm damaged trees to fall.”

Rhodenizer says sporadic outages are common after big weather events like Arthur.

“It’s normal after any significant storm, whether it’s been a significant wind storm like we’ve been through, or a significant ice storm to have continuing after effects for awhile afterwards where storm weakened trees fall.”

NSP trying to clean things up

It’s expected that these trees will continue to fall in the near future, and Rhodenizer says it’s tough to put a timeline on exactly how long the process with take. He says NSP is out trying to clean things up along power lines.

“We have our tree crews out patrolling lines, looking for this type of threat so that they can take care of the problem trees before they fall. But obviously we’ve got thousands and thousands of kilometres of lines, so it takes time to do that all.”

All of the Thursday morning outages are expected to be restored by late morning.

Earlier, there were outages in Bridgewater and Caledonia.