NEW GLASGOW, N.S. — All public schools in Nova Scotia will be closed on Tuesday, Sept. 10.
The Nova Scotai Department of Educatoion made the decision based on the recommendation of the Emergency Management Office. An update on school openings will be issued on Tuesday, Sept. 10.
Nova Scotia Power issued a release on Monday, Sept. 9 saying that teams continue to assess damage.
“Over the past day and a half, our teams have been in towns, villages and remote areas across Nova Scotia, patrolling our 32,000 kilometres of power lines and assessing the damage Dorian caused. Damage includes an estimated 3,700 trees on lines and 300 broken or leaning poles,” said Karen Hutt, President & CEO, Nova Scotia Power. “This information is giving us better detail around the nature of the repairs that need to be made and the challenges ahead, as well as helping us continue to plan the work of our power line and forestry crews.”
Work is prioritized to safely restore service to critical customers and infrastructure, then the greatest number of customers as quickly as possible.
“Our field work is enabling us to prioritize and advance work in many communities,” Hutt said. “However, this means that smaller, and in some cases complex, outages must be pushed back in a number of cases.”
Damage assessors have identified approximately 4,500 outages across Nova Scotia that are single-customer outages, meaning one repair will restore electricity to one customer. In most regions of Nova Scotia, ETRs for those customers will move to Thursday. Again, Nova Scotia Power will work with those customers throughout that process.
“We know this is frustrating and customers want their power back as soon as possible. That’s what we want, too, and it’s what we’re working toward in a planned and organized fashion,” Hutt said. “We will continue to refine our ETRs as we gather more information, and we continue to add crews. We know that getting the most accurate information is important to our customers and we want to be transparent and timely with what we know at this point.”
Customers can check on updated ETRs via Nova Scotia Power’s outage map at nspower.ca or call by calling 1-877-428-6004.
Many of the single-customer outages are instances involving broken meter masts. The meter mast is the tube that runs straight up from the customer’s electricity meter. Nova Scotia Power’s customer care team is proactively coordinating with electrical contractors and inspectors to streamline the repair process for customers who may have incurred damage to their meter mast as a result of the storm.
Meanwhile, additional power line crews continue to arrive in Nova Scotia to assist in the recovery from Hurricane Dorian. Already, Nova Scotia Power has restored service to more than half of the 400,000 customers who lost power due to Dorian.
“All the teams responding to the destruction Dorian has caused – our crews, our contractors, the Emergency Management Office, the Canadian Armed Forces, the three levels of government and first responders – we’re all united in working to return our province to state of normalcy as soon as we can.” Hutt said.
