VANCOUVER — BC Hydro says a windstorm that knocked out power in thousands of homes and businesses is believed to be the largest such outage ever for the utility.
Winds gusting up to 80 kilometres an hour at the height of Saturday's storm in southwestern British Columbia toppled trees that damaged transmission lines and crushed cars.
BC Hydro estimates half of its 1.4-million customers on Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland lost power.
It says the peak number of customers without electricity was 400,000 on Saturday, compared to 240,000 during an outage in December 2006.
As of Tuesday afternoon, about 3,500 customers, mostly in Surrey and Coquitlam, still had no electricity.
The utility says it has called in crews from as far north as Fort St. John but rain has saturated the soil in some locations so it's unsafe for workers to bring in heavy equipment.
