The head of Bluewater Power says Lambton County was relatively unscathed during the ice storm while thousands of people in the Windsor-Chatham-Kent region still are without power.
Wednesday night, snow and freezing rain pelleted the province with communities along Lake Erie and Lake Ontario taking the brunt of the storm. Thousands of homes in Windsor-Essex and Chatham-Kent were still without power into Thursday afternoon because of the ice build up and trees falling on power lines.
Lambton had a fair amount of ice build up, but Bluewater Power CEO Janice McMichael-Dennis says the local electricity grid stood up “incredibly well.”
There were just three problems across the region Bluewater Power serves including six homes in Alvinston which lost power for two hours in the middle of the night after a tree fell on a line.
The trickiest fix was an incident on Highway 402 at Airport Road where a wire fell across the road. McMichael-Dennis says the OPP closed the roadway while power crews removed the line. And it was a bit of a trick to reattach it; a veteran employee “climbed the pole in the sleet and rain…it was slippery and iced covered…it’s not a project you do very often.
“To have a storm like that go through and have only 25 homes affected – our system did incredibly well,” she added.
But Bluewater Power employees are busy fixing storm damage. Two crews of two men and a bucket truck are working in Chatham-Kent today where 3,000 people were without power because of the storm. McMichael-Dennis says they may return Friday, depending on the need.
