The mayor of Lunenburg is condemning the actions of some residents who confronted Nova Scotia Power employees trying to restore power during an extended outage earlier this month.

Many residents and businesses were without power for much of Saturday, Feb. 8 after a utility pole caught on fire that morning. The outage stretched from within Lunenburg to neighbouring communities.

Mayor Jamie Myra said most customers had power restored by Saturday evening, but there were some in the South Stonehurst area who were told they would have to wait until the morning because Nova Scotia Power technicians can’t work longer than 16 hours straight.

“People got very vocal, hateful [and] disrespectful. They were shining lights on the linemen [who were] on the poles trying to fix them. They were yelling profanities. They were basically making them feel unsafe,” he said in an interview.

Myra made a statement at the beginning of last week’s town council meeting saying the behaviour by residents was unacceptable. He warned that staff at Nova Scotia Power said if an incident like this happens again, employees will be called away from the site despite the status of the outage.

Workers doing repairs aren’t the ones who make decisions about operations and infrastructure investment, Myra said.

He said many of these employees live in the area and are leaving their homes to try to help others.

“We have to be better. We’re known for our compassion and our friendliness and our kindness here in this area. And that’s not what we showed two weeks ago,” Myra said.

Tensions between public and Nova Scotia Power

Several Lunenburg residents told CBC News reliability isn’t a concern when it comes to their power, but some said it is a problem and they’re fed up with it.

“Like everybody, we have frequent power outages,” said Anke Holm, who has lived in Lunenburg for 15 years.

Holm said every time there’s a storm or strong winds, she anticipates losing electricity at home. 

She believes there’s been more tension between people across the province and Nova Scotia Power recently due to widespread issues with inflated bills and proposed rate hikes.

That’s still no excuse for harassing employees on the ground who are just trying to do their jobs, Holm said. 

“The workers are the last in the row and these poor guys go out in the worst conditions. I’m not envying them,” she said.

Nova Scotia Power declined an interview request.

“This isn’t the first time our crews have faced challenging interactions in the field, including negative comments,” a spokesperson said in an email. 

Plan to prevent these types of issues

Lunenburg is one of four municipalities in Nova Scotia that operates its own power utility. 

The town announced plans last year to spend millions of dollars to double the capacity of its power grid.

One of the reasons it took so long to get power restored to all customers after the fire was because it doesn’t have the capacity to turn everything back on at once without causing a shortage, Myra said.

“We in Lunenburg have a five-year capital plan to spend upwards of about $20 million to upgrade our system to hopefully prevent these types of outages from happening,” he said. 

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