Dorian costs Maritime Electric over $3M

Maritime Electric has crunched the numbers on its costs from post-tropical storm Dorian and it has caused the largest storm impact the utility has ever dealt with on P.E.I.

The utility has submitted the storm costs to the Island Regulatory and Appeals Commission along with considerations for how Maritime Electric hopes to recover those costs.

However, Maritime Electric spokesperson Kim Griffin says there has been no decision made yet.

"We've compiled our costs and it's approximately $3.5 million," Griffin said. "The vast majority of that is the number of contractors that we've used as well as our own personnel."

Contractors were called in from other parts of Canada, such as Ontario, New Brunswick and Newfoundland.

About 97 utility poles camedown and fallen trees took out power lines due to the wind brought on by the post-tropical storm, she said.

Some Islanders were left without power for over a week.

"The primary reason for the outages mostly were the trees that had come down across our lines all across P.E.I.," Griffin said.

Griffin said post-tropical storm Dorian was "far beyond" any storm the utility budgets for in a year.

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