B.C. storm knocks out power for thousands [Video]

More than 230,000 households and businesses in British Columbia were without electricity Monday during the peak of a storm during which heavy rains and strong winds downed power lines.

More than 100,000 BC Hydro customers on the Lower Mainland, the Sunshine Coast and Vancouver Island remained without electricity into the afternoon – and the utility warned that some outages would last overnight.

“Crews will work throughout the night and into the day tomorrow until all customers are restored. We’ll continue to provide estimated restoration times for individual outages as they’re available,” an update from BC Hydro said.

“Our first priority is outages involving downed lines and situations posing a risk to public safety. Next, crews will focus on restoring power to critical and municipal services, followed by large outages affecting the highest number of customers, and then to smaller outages.”

BC Hydro said anyone who encounters a downed power line …