Saturday before some NB Power customers see power restored

It will be Saturday afternoon before someNB Power customers see their electricity restored, according to the utility's website.

About 700 homes and business were still in the dark Friday eveningafter two snow storms hit the province this week.

The bulk of the outages are inVictoria andMadawaska counties, where 380customers were stillaffected around 8 p.m. AT, followed by Restigouchewith 249.

Most customers are expected tobe reconnected by Saturdaybetween noon and 1 p.m.

About 200 crews are on the ground to restore power andmost of the outages caused by Wednesday's storm have been resolved, according to a statement from NB Power spokeswoman DeborahNobes.

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Tony O'Hara, chief technology officer and vice-president of engineering for the utility, said the heavy, wet snow that blanketed much of the province is to blame for the outages. Thatisn't something the utility could prepare for, said O'Hara.

"This time of year, we're into December,and we're still seeing temperatures right around the zero mark," said O'Hara.

"So, when you combine that with snowfall, and it's swinging either one way or another you're either going to get rain or some snow that's not a challenge, or you get heavy, wet sticky snow or freezing rain, if it's right around the zero mark. That's unfortunately what we experienced over the past couple of days."

O'Hara also said treacherous road conditions made it difficult to get crews to outages.

"There were even snowplow trucks that went off the road in the northern part of the province where we were trying to restore power. So that impeded our efforts significantly," said O'Hara.

Questions about reliability

Despite the numerous outages over the past three days, which peaked at about 45,000 customers without power, O'Hara said reliability for the utility is high.

"If you do look over the last 10 years, actually, our reliability was consistently improving. We were actually the best in the region," said O'Hara.

O'Hara said perceptions the utility was not reliable stem from a couple of major weather events over the past few years

"I think that there's certainly a carryover from 2013 and 2014 that is fresh in people's minds," said O'Hara, referring to an ice storm that hit southern New Brunswick and Hurricane Arthur.

O'Hara said regardless of the outages the utility's infrastructure held up during the storms.

"We have about 600,000 poles in the province. Over these last three days of this storm, only two of those polls broke, out of 600,000. We've got about 125,000 pole-top transformers feeding customers, none of those failed in this effort," said O'Hara.