Heavy winds brought trees down onto power lines and played havoc with electrical service in the Lower Mainland on Friday afternoon.
B.C. Hydro said Abbotsford, Langley, Delta and Richmond were the communities hardest hit, and at one point the utility company had 20,000 customers in the region without power. It was also coping with similar numbers of outages on Vancouver Island, which was hammered with high winds.
Locally, some 2,549 customers in Abbotsford and Langley were affected from about 3 p.m. until power was restored at 5 p.m., in an area between Downes Road and Peardonville, east all the way to 248th Street.
There was a longer outage that affected 988 customers (homes and businesses), from Glenn Mountain Drive west to Marshall, and those customers were without power from 3:35 p.m. until it was restored at 10:15 p.m.
There were numerous smaller outages caused by downed trees, birds contacting wires and a car that hit a power pole, but most of those outages affected between 20 and less than five customers.