Yesterday a big storm hit the Coast of BC and shook the province like never before. It showed us how unprepared we are if the “Big One” (earthquake) ever hits us. How used to we have become to our life of luxury here in Canada, rarely do we go without electricity and if somehow the power goes down it is an isolated incident and only last a few hours but this time it was different. As I am writing this article, some people have gone over 24 hours without electricity. Some people were very lucky, others lost power but their power is now back and others are still without power. I fall into the middle group myself. We lost power around 2pm and just after midnight our power was back online. I was one of the luckier of the ones that lost power however not everyone shares the same fate.

Did BC Hydro do their job to the fullest or did they mess up big time? If I ignore the first few hours where they were absolutely terrible I would give them a 9/10, pretty impressive. However the fact still remains, in the first few hours where thousands started losing power, the BC Hydro website crashed and people were left without any information at all. From roughly noon, when their website went down, to roughly 5pm, when their Twitter account became extremely active, they were not doing so well on the customer service front. At some point BC Hydro realized that people were getting angry and that their website wasn’t coming back online anytime soon. They became very active with their Twitter account and started providing as detailed information as they possibly could. Now this might not be very reassuring for someone that was sitting without power but it was at least reassuring to know that BC Hydro was doing everything they could.

At 10pm when they posted a PDF with estimates of when power would be back, people at least had a timeline to look forward to. The only problem was that they couldn’t live up to many of these estimates and have had to push them back multiple times. Their twitter account since yesterday has remained extremely active since 5pm, providing every update possible. They have in fact even setup a temporary page on their website to keep customers updated.

We estimate that 530,000 customers lost power at some point during Saturday’s windstorm – one of the biggest single-day storm events we’ve ever experienced. We’ve restored power to more than 350,000 customers in 24 hours.

We have more than 400 people working on restoring power including over 250 power line workers. We have brought in crews from all over B.C. to help including crews from Prince George, Kamloops, Smithers, Terrace, Vernon, and Vancouver Island.

That is what their website currently says along with providing the latest PDF file of estimates of repairs. People that are sitting without power still might not care about all this and just want their power back but by keeping everyone as informed as possible BC Hydro has done a great job avoiding a PR disaster. Their will still be people that complain but there is no way to avoid those people. In fact many people are complimenting them for their updates and thanking the hard working crews.

Update: August 30th 11:15pm, at the latest count according to their Twitter account, 90,000 customers remained without power.

Update 2: August 31st 9:00pm, 24,000 customers still without power. These are the areas that suffered the most damage. Just under 50% of the customers are from Surrey. The BC Hydro website is now fully back online.

Update 3: September 2nd 4:35am, “We estimate that 710,000 – nearly 50% of our 1.4 million customers on Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland – lost power due to Saturday’s windstorm. The storm is believed to be the single largest outage event in BC Hydro’s history.” Power has been restored to all but 100 people.

Source: BC Hydro; BC Hydro