Nova Scotia Power explains weekend outage that left 47K in the dark

Saturday power outages leave thousands in the dark Thousands of customers in Nova Scotia lost power on Saturday after a transmission line issue.

It was windy and wet in the Sydney, N.S., area on Monday morning, but not many people lost power.

Instead, on Saturday - when the weather was fine - roughly 47,000 Nova Scotia Power customers in the Cape Breton Regional Municipality and the Halifax area suddenly found themselves in the dark.

"Well, it was unexpected,” said Mike Black, co-owner of The Black Spoon Bistro in North Sydney.

Black’s restaurant had to close for much of Saturday afternoon due to the power outage, and lost its lunch hour business.

"$3,000 in lost revenue, and then I mean people lost shifts,” Black said of the impact on his business. “So it sucked for them too, right? I mean all around, it was just not awesome."

At the Glace Bay Miners Forum, teams participating in a March Break minor hockey tournament had to change venues.

"Well, we were in the middle of our annual Charlie Campbell Memorial Tournament when the lights went out,” said James Edwards, president of Glace Bay Minor Hockey. "(The tournament organizer) got on the phone and got ice time in other rinks - in New Waterford, the County Rink (in Coxheath), the Emera Centre (North Sydney) and Membertou - and sent teams, officials, scorekeepers, parents, you name it."

Nova Scotia Power told CTV News Atlantic on Monday an interruption to the transmission line that runs between the province and New Brunswick, following an ice storm in Nova Scotia’s Cumberland County late last week, caused the outage.

The utility added power was cut off to people elsewhere in order to safely stabilize the grid.

"We know it was definitely ice build-up on the transmission line, that's right,” said Matt Drover, Nova Scotia Power’s storm lead. "Unfortunately, it is very difficult to predict when those outages will occur. When we do planned maintenance, when we know for sure there is going to be an outage on a line, we'll do everything we can to communicate to our customers."

NB Power said they and their customers have a stake in this, too.

"We believe it was on the Nova Scotia side of the line, but we'll obviously participate with Nova Scotia Power in understanding what happened and learn from any events so we can prevent those in the future,” said NB Power CEO Lori Clark.

Nova Scotia Power also said utility plans to build a new transmission line to New Brunswick over the next few years to try and address ice build-up going forward, noting they recently got environmental approval to go ahead with the project.

For more Nova Scotia news visit our dedicated provincial page.