BLOOMFIELD, P.E.I. — A motor vehicle accident in the Tignish area just before 11 a.m. Thursday temporarily put the power off for approximately 2,700 Maritime Electric customers west of the utility’s Huntley substation.
Maritime Electric spokeswoman Kim Griffin said a crew was able to isolate the outage to a smaller area and then had everyone back online by the noon hour.
Griffin, however, was not optimistic that would be the last outage of the day.
“I suspect we are going to have a day like that with the weather forecast,” she said Thursday morning, noting the heavy rain and gale-force wind in the forecast.
She said there were concerns that trees possibly weakened by last month’s devastating hurricane might come down on power lines.
As expected, the weather did cause more problems as the day progressed.
Griffin said the utility was reporting 5,756 customers without power by 4:30 p.m., with about 400 of those in Prince County, including 150 on Lennox Island.
There were about 300 customers without power in the Canoe Cove area, 200 in New London area, 150 in Stanley Bridge-Granville, 150 in Argyle Show and 130 in Cumberland as well as numerous outages in other communities.
The utility had 18 crews out working on restoring power.
“The plan is to keep the crews out throughout the night, trying to get that power back on,” said Griffin.
She added the utility is keeping an eye on the weather, aware that strong wind gusts were expected to persist until 7 p.m., leaving potential for more outages. Except for the morning outage in the Tignish area, Griffin said all of the outages were caused by trees and limbs on power lines.
