Prince Edward Island electricity fully restored following Dorian

Last few thousand outages a daunting challenge

Kevin Yarr · CBC News · Posted: Sep 16, 2019 7:26 AM AT | Last Updated: 11 hours ago

Utility poles held up, but trees on the lines cut electricity.

Eight days after post-tropical storm Dorian swept over P.E.I., Maritime Electric restored power to all of its customers.

Company spokesperson Kim Griffin said the last storm-related outage was restored at 3 a.m. Monday.

Last Sunday morning outages peaked at almost 65,000, but Griffin said in some ways the last couple of thousand were the hardest.

"It could be daunting when you look at the system on Saturday and Sunday and say we have X thousand customers out but they're all individual or outages of one or two," she said.

"You're looking at can we get all this done over the next two days?"

The Maritime Electric outage maps was showing two customers without power at 6:43 a.m. Monday. Griffin said those were new outages, and that it a handful of outages on the system is not uncommon in day-to-day operation.

Resilient infrastructure

While the power is on, the utility still faces weeks of work cleaning up around the lines, Griffin said.

Despite outages that covered almost the whole province, Griffin said the overall the infrastructure in the system held up very well.

"In the end we had 90 to 100 poles reported down out of about 130,000. The challenge for us was simply the hundreds and hundreds of trees that were down across our lines," she said.

Work will begin to Monday on calculating the cost of the storm.