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UPDATE (6:40 p.m.): FortisBC is now saying power has been restored to all customers.
Michael Allison says crews now believe the cause of the outage was "the triggering of a protective relay." Similar to a breaker in your home, the protective relay activates to interrupt a circuit in order to avoid continuing to conduct electricity.
Allison says crews will remain on site to ensure service remains uninterrupted, and will return to the site tomorrow morning to run additional tests.
Original Story:
About 2,000 residents of Kelowna’s Mission area are still without power, after an outage knocked out power to more than 7,300 people.
Michael Allison, a FortisBC spokesperson, says the company first became aware of the outage just after 5:20 p.m. this evening.
Crews were dispatched to the area and managed to restore power to about 5,300 residents, but 2,000 people are still in the dark and cold.
Crews remain in the area, and Allison says FortisBC has sent more reinforcements to help out. At this time, Fortis still doesn’t know what caused the outage.
“I want people to know that crews are working as safely and as quickly as possible because they do know it is cold and people want their power back on,” he says.
He says anyone who is still impacted by the outage can call Fortis at 1-866-436-7847 to let the company know. If they’re able they can head to Twitter, where @FortisBC will be providing updates.
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