A storm that brought freezing rain, hail, and severe snowfall in Nova Scotia last Friday led to power outages so severe, that thousands still had no power on Sunday.
According to Environment Canada, the freezing rain – which began last week and lasted 24 hours in some areas – was expected to end on Saturday. On Saturday, as many as 53,000 Nova Scotia Power customers were without electricity, as trees bearing heavy snowfall snapped and the falling branches damaged power lines across the region.
Nova Scotia Power crews worked to restore the lost power, bringing down the number of affected customers to over 29,000 on Sunday morning. That figure fell to just under 15,000 later that evening. While the outages are scattered across NS, much of the energy failures were centered in the Cape Breton, Halifax and Annapolis Valley areas.
In an interview with CBC News on Sunday, Nova Scotia Power storm lead Matt Drover said that the utility is looking to restore most of the outages that day, with the company prioritizing areas that have been energy-deprived the longest, or areas where the most customers are affected.
"There may be a few small pockets that go into tomorrow, most likely in those cases it'd be the areas that first lost power yesterday, where we had the significant freezing rain on Saturday," Drover said. "But the majority will be back on today."
Drover had explained in another interview that the ice storm is NS’ fifth major storm for the year.
