Most of New Brunswick has power back, last few customers to be restored by evening
CBC News | Posted: December 27, 2022 3:39 PM | Last Updated: December 27, 2022
About 71,000 N.B. Power customers were without power at storm's peak, utility says
Most New Brunswickers had their power restored by mid-Tuesday afternoon following an outage beginning on Dec. 23 that peaked at around 70,000 customers.
Only around 30 customers are still without power. But they are expected to have their power back by Tuesday evening.
Marc Belliveau, an N.B. Power spokesperson, said on Tuesday morning that the remaining customers without power would be "the very last outages that we would be dealing with."
He said many of the outages are one or two houses, but they still require the same restoration time as an outage affecting 50 houses.
"We're talking about clearing branches, clearing trees, stringing wires back up if they're down or changing insulators that might have been broken," he said. "And in some cases, there's broken poles."
The majority of the remaining outages are in Carleton, according to the outage map.
The start of the outage came with a pre-Christmas storm that brought heavy rain, high winds and snow to different parts of the province.
Belliveau said there were 500 employees working to get power restored at the outage's peak, but there might be fewer today because of fewer outages.
Outage numbers have been fluctuating throughout the day across the province. Belliveau said that's because workers often need to take some customers offline in order to do repairs.
Belliveau said this outage event is one of the most significant in the last few decades for New Brunswick because storms will normally hit one region, but this one hit the whole province.