The surprise windstorm that bashed the most densely populated areas of British Columbia on Saturday and created the largest single outage in B.C. Hydro’s history was largely unforeseen until it was almost upon Metro Vancouver.
Although Hydro was prepared for heavy rainfall and perhaps even flash flooding over the weekend, it had little warning that high winds — with some gusts as high as 115 km/h — were imminent, said Wayne Martell, B.C. Hydro’s regional manager of distribution.
Even as exhausted repair crews struggled to reconnect the last 36,000 customers of more than 525,000 who lost power in a rolling cascade of failures, Martell said Monday some early lessons have emerged.
Hydro will now likely change its weather analytics to try to better predict events that could affect its service reliability, he said.
“One of the things we’re looking at is how we can get some better weather analytics, more dedicated to the utility business,” he said.
Martell, who has worked for Hydro for nearly 43 years, said he’s never seen such an attack on the company’s system. “This one, at 525,000 customer impacts, is just out of this world for me.”
The six weeks of rolling storms in 2006, including one that flattened parts of Stanley Park, left more people without power, he said. Hydro is also accustomed to getting power back on within 24 hours, even with major winter outages that can leave up to 150,000 people without power.
But Saturday’s windstorm and outages — nearly 2,000 incident reports between Vancouver Island to the west, Sunshine Coast to the north and Hope to the east — quickly overwhelmed Hydro’s capabilities. The winds were so severe that they not only blew down trees and branches across hundreds of the 25,000-volt distribution lines that feed houses, but also 25 important 60,000-volt transmission lines feeding a number of substations. At one point, key substations in North Vancouver, Langley and Surrey were all offline.
“We kind of started to see it almost everywhere at once. It started off with a couple thousand, 15,000, 20,000, and then very quickly it rose up to the significant numbers of where we saw, within four hours, we were up to over 400,000 customers without service.”
What worries Martell now is that he’s seeing a change in the kind of weather events that can disrupt the region’s power.
“We’re starting to see weather we’ve never seen before, patterns that are not as predictable as what people who have been around a long time get used to seeing. We have good weather service information. This unpredictable stuff that is coming along that is causing a lot of trouble, not just for us, is very difficult to anticipate,” he said.
Martell isn’t the only one thinking that way.
Sadhu Johnston, Vancouver’s deputy city manager, views the windstorm as just one weather event in a summer that has “climate change” written all over it.
“If you look at the summer as a whole, this will go down in history as the first summer Vancouver really experienced climate change,” he said. “Think about air quality problems due to the extreme fires, the drought, the water shortages, extended periods of heat and then followed by extreme storm events. All we’re missing here is very high water levels.”
Johnston said the city has been predicting this kind of unusual weather for a while. In 2012 city council approved a “climate adaptation strategy” that called for changes in how the city plans for extreme weather events. It began planting different types of drought-tolerant trees as part of its 2020 Greenest City plan.
That effort had little impact on Saturday’s windstorm. The city immediately lost more than 500 street trees, many of which were weakened by the summer’s drought. Many more may be found to be damaged in post-storm inspections.
Both Martell and Johnston said the drought dried out roots, branches and leaves, creating the opportunity for trees to topple and branches to land on electricity lines with impunity.
Johnston said the city had expected heavy rains Saturday and had put its emergency operations centre on standby early in the morning. But when the wind hit and the city’s 311 switchboard began to light up with the first of 1,500 calls, Johnston opened the EOC at noon. It stayed open until 11 p.m. Sunday. When a tree crashed down across busy 12th Avenue just before it turns into Grandview Highway, Johnston knew the city was witnessing an unusual weather event.
The Pacific National Exhibition closed its fair on Saturday briefly because of the high winds, but reopened and offered free general admission.
While the fair went on, Hydro scrambled with a looming labour shortage. It called in both contract and staff crews from as far away as Prince George, Terrace and Fort St. John. Trucks with crews that could be pressed into service in Kamloops and Kelowna were driven through the night Saturday. Power-line technicians from farther away were told to jump on aircraft with their linesmen’s tools and join trucks when they arrived.
As of Monday afternoon Hydro had 326 people working flat-out to connect service. They’ve been working 16-hour days, with eight hours in between for rest. Martell said Hydro has also received offers of help from other utilities — including Fortis’s electricity operations — but has declined for now.
The city also has 75 “urban forest” crews out cleaning up the remains of its street trees. Among the hardest hit areas are the Hastings-Sunrise and east Vancouver neighbourhoods, where many trees were uprooted. But trees were also flattened downtown where winds gained ferocity, magnified by the canyons of office towers.
Both Hydro and the city say it is too early to determine the cost of the storm for insurance purposes. But Johnston said the city has already started to receive claims from homeowners for substantial damage done to houses, fences and garages.
ICBC says it also received more than 3,500 vehicle damage claims calls on Saturday and Sunday. Spokesman Adam Grossman said ICBC’s eClaim online system normally records 70-80 claims per day on weekends but this weekend received more than 500. The insurance corporation added more employees to take care of the bump in claims, he said.
