Although the wind blew with a vengeance through Oceanside during the Christmas holiday, disruption to power supplies to everywhere but Errington was limited.
In that community though, the power went out at just about the worst time possible — during the afternoon as residents were starting to cook their Christmas dinner.
Errington saw a whopping 1,949 homes go dark just past 1:30 p.m. on Christmas Day because of a tree falling across power lines. It was restored just before 4 p.m. As well, 25 homes went dark on Dec. 19 and another handful on Dec. 14 due to a variety of causes.
BC Hydro reported two outages in the Qualicum Beach area, both impacting fewer than five homes. The first, on Dec. 23, saw a handful of homes on Namqua Road go dark after a motor vehicle crash. As well, on Dec. 27, a bird shorting out the wires had a similarly negligible impact — except to the bird.
A similar incident — with similar results, saw power knocked out to 16 homes in Parksville on Dec. 15 south of Tryon Lane and west of Dickinson Way.
Bowser-area residents faced more outages, but they were all small, with the largest being on Dec. 14, when 36 homes were blacked out after a tree came down across the lines. Equipment failure was cited as the cause for three outages in Bowser, on Dec. 26, 27 and 28. All of these impacted fewer than 10 homes. On Christmas Eve, another bird shorted out power lines, knocking out power to fewer than five homes.