We're committed to safely restoring your power as soon as possible during an outage.
When a storm happens, our crews do everything they can to repair damage and get the lights back on for customers. If you’ve ever wondered why you sometimes need to wait for your power to be restored, here are a few things to keep in mind about the restoration process.
We stand our crews down when the wind reaches over 80 km an hour. Safety is our top priority and sometimes that can mean waiting until the wind slows down so we can safely start our restoration work. When this happens, crews focus on assessing damage and restoring power from the ground when possible.
Damage can be more severe than expected. The estimated restoration time on our outage map is based on a few different considerations—weather conditions, location of the outage, past outages in the area, and more. Once our crews arrive on site and assess the damage, they sometimes identify other factors that could impact the restoration time. Things like an unplowed road, unsafe conditions, or more damage than anticipated might mean it will take more time than expected to restore your power.
We follow a safety-first approach to restoration and start by addressing public safety concerns, followed by critical infrastructure. When restoring power during an outage, safety comes first no matter what. That means there are several steps we need to take before we can restore power to individual homes and businesses. As illustrated below, we address any public safety concerns first and move on to our high-voltage transmission lines and substations. We then focus on neighbourhood and area-specific restorations. Before we restore your power, it’s important we assess the damage to know what we’re dealing with, which is why you might see us in your neighbourhood, but your power is not yet restored.
The best way to stay up-to-date during a storm is to check our outage map at outagemap.nspower.ca, or to follow us on Twitter for in-the-moment storm updates and photos of our crews at work.
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