As crews with Bluewater Power continue to work on repairs from this past weekend's windy conditions, preparations are being made for another weather event.
Environment Canada issued a special weather statement on Wednesday as wind gusts of up to 90 kilometres per hour are expected Thursday morning or early afternoon.
Bluewater Power President and CEO Janice McMichael-Dennis said the utility provider has gone into "storm mode".
"That just means ensuring we are absolutely as prepared as possible to respond to our community, so that involves ensuring that people are ready to go. In this case, [we'll] send people home and have them report back in the evening so that we have full-time around-the-clock coverage," she said. "We make sure that the trucks are fueled, we make sure parts are ready."
While making sure preparations are made, McMichael-Dennis said crews are still putting the finishing touches on repairs to damage sustained last weekend.
Not a good look… at all… Power will be out on an emergency basis in select parts (not all!) of the London Road area near the Mall until we can deal with this mess…#WeHateWindGusts pic.twitter.com/v4YDylXmWJ
— Bluewater Power (@BluewaterPower) December 11, 2021
"During the storm, we made a lot of temporary, short-term repairs in order to get people's [power] restored as quickly as possible, with the intent of going back and doing the more permanent fixes later," she said. "So we've been working on that all week and just wrapping that up, just in time to come into some more wind."
McMichael-Dennis said there were a few reported power outages last weekend that affected a couple thousand customers.
"The most impactful [outage] was likely the one at Lambton Mall which is always heartbreaking to have a commercial district affected two weeks before Christmas. That [power outage] was about four hours," said McMichael-Dennis.
In total the wind last weekend downed five hydro poles. McMichael-Dennis said two of the downed poles on London Line caused a power outage of approximately six hours.
