New report gives breakdown of Nova Scotia Power's Fiona outage statistics

A Nova Scotia Power report on the impact of post-tropical storm Fiona reveals the average time it took to restore power in each region, as well as how long it took for all customers to get their power back.

The organization, unlike telecommunications companies, is required to provide a detailed public report on large outage events.

The report found that nearly 425,000 unique customers were impacted by an outage because of the late September event. However, there were more than 750,000 total customer interruptions, meaning many customers experienced multiple outages during the restoration period.

Nova Scotia Power spokesperson Jacqueline Foster said at the peak of the outages, 405,000 customers were without power, the highest on record. She said the impact from high winds and falling trees was unprecedented, and the extent of the damage was five times that of Hurricane Dorian, which hit Nova Scotia in September 2019.

She said in situations of widespread outages, the company triages its restoration efforts.

"Nova Scotia Power prioritizes restoration to situations impacting public safety, followed by critical transmission infrastructure, EMO infrastructure priorities, and then focuses on restoring power to the greatest number of customers as quickly as possible," said Foster in an email statement.

The average restoration time was just over 100 hours, or about four days. Just over 50 per cent of customers had their power restored within 48 hours of crews starting their work.

However, restoration times varied between regions. The northeast region, which includes Pictou and Antigonish, experienced the longest outages in the province.

There were 16.81 days between the first outage and full restoration in that region. After 48 hours of work to restore power, only about 18 per cent of customers had their power back. It also had the longest average restoration time at 6.18 days.

The Eastern Shore experienced the second longest average restoration time at 5.22 days.

Cape Breton East, which includes Sydney, also experienced long outages compared to the rest of the province. There were 16.63 days from their first outage to full restoration. Nearly 20 per cent of customers had their power back after 48 hours of restoration work.

In the metro region, which includes Halifax, the average restoration time was 2.87 days. and Almost 70 per cent of customers had their power back after 48 hours of work.

In all regions, it took at least two weeks from the time of the first outage to have power restored for all customers.

Foster said Nova Scotia Power undertook extensive preparations for the storm, deploying 800 workers on the ground in advance, the most to date.

She said the company has been heavily involved in post-storm clean-up, proactively removing over 4,000 weak or damaged trees.

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