The City of New Westminster has tweeted out that the power is now back on in all parts of the city.
“We have now located the source of the power outage and expect power to be restored by 6 p.m. tonight,” said an update from the city at 1:15 p.m. May 30 - and the city was pretty accurate in that assessment.
The City of New Westminster started receiving calls of a power outage around 7:30 p.m. Wednesday night. While the city was able to restore power to some of the residences and businesses in the outage in parts of the Glenbrook, Queen’s Park and Massey-Victory Heights neighbourhoods, some properties around McBride Boulevard and Eighth Avenue are still without power.
Rod Carle, general manager of the electrical utility, said crews were able to restore power to 90 per cent of the impacted properties. Crews are still working to determine the cause of the outage.
“We believe we might have found it, but we have to pull the cable out to confirm that it’s damaged. That’s where we are at right now. We are hoping within the next two hours to confirm that. If that’s the actual fault we will know how long it will take us to put the power back on,” he told the Record Thursday morning. “If it’s not, then we have to go to the next manhole, and then the next manhole etc.”
When the outage was first reported, Carle said the entire feeder at the New West substation kicked out, taking out power in an area that included 10th Avenue, McBride Boulevard and Cumberland Street.
“A lot of it is underground cable, so you can’t really spot any faults. What we do is we patrol the area first to see if there is anything obvious. Then we turn the breaker back on at the substation and hope that it holds. We did that and it kicked open again,” he said. “Then we have a process of elimination and we start going to underground vaults and we open up switches, etc.”
Carle said crews were fairly quickly able to determine that the fault wasn’t at the substation and get it back on.
“From there it is trying to patrol underground cable, go to vaults and see if you can establish a fault. We did that most of the night,” he said. “We thought there was an underground splice that had went bad. We actually took that apart and put a new one in. We turned the power back on – we are now talking about 3 a.m. – and the power kicked off again.
Carle said that left crews in a “process of elimination” and going into different underground vaults to find the source of the problem.
“We have to make sure we are doing everything safe,” he said. “When you get into underground cable, as nice as it looks being underground, it is probably the hardest and most difficult area to find when there are faults.”
If crews determine the cable they’re now pulling out near Eighth and Colborne is the problem, the city will be able to provide an estimate on when power will be restored.
“Until we can confirm that, we don’t really know,” Carle said.
According to Carle, 12 to 14 city employees, including seven linemen, have been working on the issue. Because they can only work so many hours, the city has brought in a contractor to assist.
“We had to pump some water out of the manholes this morning. They just finished that. We had to isolate some other cables to make sure that everything is done safely,” he said. “It’s quite a process when you are working around live voltage.”
