CHARLOTTETOWN, P.E.I. - Maritime Electric will continue to work to restore power today to the 16 remaining individual outages from yesterday’s windstorm.
High winds left many Islanders in the dark Tuesday as downed trees knocked out power to about 27,000 customers.
Maritime Electric reported a downed tree on a power line between Gardener Road and Dunk River Road in Bedeque caused one of the biggest outages.
At its peak, almost 20,000 Maritime Electric customers were without power Tuesday while a further 7,200 Summerside Electric customers had no service.
Summerside Electric turned on its diesel backup generators Tuesday morning to bring power back to most of the city.
Greg Gaudet, Summerside’s director of municipal services, said the city had enough resources in diesel generators to provide electricity to about half of Summerside Electric’s customers.
“The city concentrated on the schools and public facilities providing services to the public as its first provision of power and those that do not have capabilities of back up generation on site,” Gaudet said.
Full power was restored to Summerside by 2:05 p.m. and as of 2:30 p.m., Maritime Electric reported it had restored power to all but about 500 customers.
The power outages also forced the early closure of the Montague, Three Oaks and Westisle families of schools.
Northumberland Ferries announced Monday it was cancelling all Tuesday crossings in anticipation of the high winds.
The wind also caused a relatively rare complete closure of the Confederation Bridge to all traffic for some time.
It later opened to some cars but remained closed to any high-sided vehicles.
Saltwire Network chief meteorologist Cindy Day warned of possible wind gusts of up to 90 km/h through Tuesday morning and early afternoon.
Day said Islanders should continue to keep an eye on the weather over the next couple of days as it could include some of the first wet snow of the year for some areas.
Another area of low pressure approaching P.E.I. from the west will bring clouds and late day showers Wednesday, Day said.
More wind is on the way for Thursday with gusts between 50 and 70 km/h with the possibility of onshore flurries.
“The break between systems is going to be short lived,” said Day.
