Service mostly back to normal after thousands lost power on weekend

Lori Johnstone experienced a five-day power outage close to Christmas two years ago, so she felt “that sense of dread” as the power started going off and on early Friday evening during the fierce rain and wind storm that hit the province.

Around 7:20 that evening it went down for good.

“The wind was howling, and we knew this wasn't going to be a super quick fix,” said Johnstone, who lives in the rural community of Waterville, about 100 kilometers northwest of Fredericton.

Johnstone's power was restored 41 hours later, though the family did get its generator going Saturday morning.

“You hear all the messages about being prepared, and we live in the country,” she said. “When you lose your power, you don't have water. You don't have [working] toilets, fresh drinking water, so we are generally very prepared.”

Johnstone was one of about 100,000 customers that lost power over the weekend, said Nicole Poirier, N.B. Power’s vice-president in charge of customer and strategy.

Poirier said crews worked all weekend and into Monday to do the necessary repairs after power was knocked out by winds as high as 135 kilometres an hour in parts of the province.

“We had a lot of trees and broken wires and some broken poles.” Poirier said. “Overall, we had approximately 600 [people] on the ground and in the back offices supporting the outage restoration … it was a busy weekend.”

There were still more than 120 customers without power early Monday afternoon, but Poirier said customers know N.B. Power is doing its best to get it restored.

Johnstone said she appreciated the continuous updates on social media and the utility crews' hard work the fixes that were needed.

She did say, however, that she’d like to see N.B. Power do more preventive work.

“We know these events are coming, and we know there's lots of trees that are close to the lines,” she said.

She also said that, while people relied on the updates, some were upset when they were told their power might not be restored until Tuesday.

“I had family members that broke down in tears because it just felt so long away,” she said.

“What they did during [the restoration work was] fantastic. The only caveat was that it would be better to not have an [estimated time of power restoration] four days away, especially when it was kind of spit-balling, like everybody kind of got that."

The storm mostly did damage to power lines and trees, but some buildings will also need structural repairs.

A section of the roof over the YMCA in Moncton sustained damage.

It may take up to eight weeks to repair the area of the roof above the lane pool.