Intense windstorm rips roof off hotel in B.C. as gusts top 110 km/h | CBC News
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An unusual cold front pushing across the Rockies caused significant damage on both sides of the B.C.-Alberta border over the weekend.
A portion of the roof of the Ramada Inn was torn off in Dawson Creek as trees and power lines were downed across B.C.
Damage was also reported at a health centre in Vermillion, Alta., east of Edmonton, as gusts reached 110 km/h.
No injuries were reported but the impacts continued to be felt on Monday, as power crews in B.C. scrambled to repair damaged equipment across the province and electricity was knocked out for tens of thousands of customers.
Brian Proctor, an Environment Canada meteorologist, said the storm came in from B.C.’s North Coast, where it also knocked out power, and managed to stay strong even as it hit the Rocky Mountains in the east.
“It was a very interesting system,” he said, describing an intense weather system that “drove itself along Highway 16” from Prince Rupert to Prince George to Dawson Creek and Fort St. John, as well as further south into the Kootenays.
While most storms of that nature tend to disappear once they hit the mountains in the east, Proctor said this one continued to remain strong, causing problems along the way.
At one point, he said, temperatures near Kelowna dropped nearly 12 C in two hours while trees and power lines were downed.
While the majority of customers had their power back by Sunday, several hundred were still without electricity on Monday afternoon as crews continued to work on repairs.
Bob Gammer of B.C. Hydro said the scale of the damage was unusual, hitting so many different regions at once.
Radio West7:57Thousands of people in B.C. left without power for days, following windstorm on Saturday.
Matt Preprost, CBC reporter in Fort St. John, has been looking into what left him and his neighbours in the dark.
He noted that B.C.’s Peace region was impacted when the windstorm damaged equipment at the W.A.C. Bennett hydrolectric dam , prompting the transmission circuit to be taken offline, something he said was “extremely rare.”
But even though that problem was quickly addressed, distribution circuits sending power to individual homes and neighbourhoods still had to be fixed on the ground at multiple locations, adding to further delays.
“This kind of outage is rare,” he said.
“We might see this every couple of years but … when you see almost all of the north impacted, that’s unusual.”
Subscribe to CBC’s Fort St. John Weekly for a round-up of the best news and stories from B.C.’s Peace and Northern Rockies.
