Nova Scotia’s power utility worked hard Monday to restore power to thousands of customers after the post-tropical storm Leeswept through the Maritimes over the weekend, bringing down trees and power lines.
The storm brought sustained winds with gusts reaching 100 kilometers per hour or more in some areas through Saturday and Sunday, affecting about 280,000 customers at the peak of the outage, said Matt Drover, director of delivery for energy from Nova Scotia Power.
“We had almost 24 hours where the storm passed over Nova Scotia with strong winds,” Mr. Drover said in an interview. The winds blew for a long period of time, hitting trees across the province. »
Drover said that with the ground saturated by record levels of rain this summer, trees were uprooted during the storm, leading to branches and entire trees falling onto power lines in some areas. The utility said Sunday it had deployed about 800 people across the province to restore power.
” In some cases, [les travailleurs] have to make repairs and put the lines back up, and in other cases they have to replace the poles – that’s the biggest challenge,” Drover said.
In the Halifax region alone, approximately 130 trees were felled, the municipality announced Sunday.
As of 5 p.m. local time Monday, the utility was still dealing with just over 14,000 outages, mostly along Nova Scotia’s South Shore, in the Annapolis Valley and in Halifax. Areas around Truro, New Glasgow and Antigonish were also affected.
Mr. Drover said he believed power would be restored to the vast majority of users by Monday evening, although it is possible that some pockets in the hardest hit areas of the South Shore could remain without power until Tuesday.
In neighboring New Brunswick, where Lee brought mostly heavy downpours, there were just under 400 customers without power late Monday afternoon, mostly in Charlotte County in the province’s southwest .
NB Power spokeswoman Dominique Couture said about 90,000 customers were affected at various times throughout the weekend, mainly due to trees and branches falling on the lines.
“It was mainly a vegetation problem,” said M.me Couture about the outages that needed to be resolved by Monday evening.
The U.S. National Hurricane Center said the storm made landfall Saturday on Long Island, on Nova Scotia’s Digby Neck, with winds gusting nearly 70 miles per hour.