Power restored after outage in Lunenburg County

Power has been restored to most of the 17,000 people affected by outages in the Bridgewater, Mahone Bayand New Germany areas Friday morning.

Nova Scotia Power spokespersonDavid Rodenhisersaid issues with the substation in Bridgewater caused the outages.

He said the substation receives bulk electricity from the transmission linesand converts it to lower voltages before it's sent out to the distribution lines in the area.

"The crews at the substation resolved the issues there and got the power safely restored to the customers," said Rodenhiser.

According to the Nova Scotia Power website, around 600 customers across the province were still without power as of 12:15 p.m., mostly in the Rhodes Corner and Mahone Bay areas.

Outages an ongoing issue, says mayor

David Mitchell, Bridgewater's mayor, said he's concerned by the frequency of power outages. He said outages havean impact on local businesses, especially on Friday the first day many of themreopened after Christmas.

"We've got grocery stores that have been closed for a couple of days, you've got businesses that have been closed for a couple of days, so a lot of people are expecting today to be able to go out and resupply," he said.

He said while Bridgewateronly has a population of about 9,000, thousands of people from the surrounding areas pour into the community every day to shop or access services.

"It affects the local economy of the community ... because we have stores that can't operate," he said.

Mitchell said he's noticedmore frequent power outages in the last two years.

"It's a beautiful, sunny day, there's literally no wind today," he said.

"If it was a storm, that's understandable. But on a day like today, we should definitely not be expecting power outages."

Rodenhiser said there's a wide variety of reasons why outages can happen.

"Including trees making contacts with lines, vehicle accidents, issues caused by equipment failures," he said.

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