Power mostly restored after outage affects thousands in northwest B.C.

More than 45,000 customers across northwest B.C. were without power after an outage at about 4:20 p.m. PT Thursday.

The B.C. Hydro dashboard showed it impacted the entire region from Vanderhoof, about 100 kilometres west of Prince George, all the way to Prince Rupert, more than 500 kilometres away as the crow flies.

Haida Gwaii and parts of the far northwest around Stewart were also impacted.

The power utility said a lightning strike was to blame, with crews working to "restore service as quickly as possible."

B.C. Hydro spokesperson Mike Kellett said restoration work would have to be done in stages, starting in Vanderhoof and working westward.

Kellett said due to the wide scale of the outage, it was likely that the sole transmission line supplying power from Prince George to Prince Rupert had been impacted. 

According to the B.C. Hydro dashboard, power was restored to most customers a few hours later. The company's online dashboard showed that as of 9:25 p.m. PT fewer than 200 customers in the affected area were still without power.

Northwest B.C. does not have backup transmission lines, which makes the region susceptible to large-scale outages. 

In 2024, B.C. Premier David Eby announced plans to build new transmission lines between Prince George and Terrace in order to provide more reliable power to industrial customers in the region.

There were no reports of outages from phone or internet providers, though the region has also experienced loss of communications in the past, such as a 2022 incident in which a beaver downed a tree onto some lines, knocking out cellphones and internet for several hours.