Incident at BC Hydro substation cut power to 54,000 customers near Victoria

VICTORIA – BC Hydro says about 54,000 customers were left without power late Thursday afternoon because of an incident at a substation on southern Vancouver Island.

Spokesman Ted Olynyk says the major event occurred after a problem with protection-and-control equipment at a substation in downtown Victoria, B.C.

He says the substation changes the voltage of electricity that arrives on transmission lines and then sends it back out to the community on distribution lines.

Olynyk says workers restored power to most if not all of the customers within an hour, but the exact cause of the outage is still under investigation.

He says nobody was hurt in the incident.

The commercial Crown corporation says it serves about 95 per cent of the province’s population through 76,000 kilometres of transmission and distribution lines, some 300 substations and about 1 million utility poles.