Nova Scotia Power says Caribbean deployment won't affect C.B. recovery

As Cape Bretoners waited to have their electricity restored after Monday's storm, a rumour began circulating: some Nova Scotia Power crews had been dispatched down south instead of remaining home to deal with a local disaster.

It turns out that bit of information is true.

Nova Scotia Power spokeswoman Sasha Irving said 10 NSP crews were sent to Grand Bahama to repair damage from Hurricane Matthew, which smashed through the Caribbean as a Category 4 storm in early October.

"What you've seen on television for Haiti, that's pretty close to the same situation thatGrand Bahamais in right now," said Irving.

"They have 19,000 customers on the island. They're in day six of no power and with the help that has been sent to them you know, some crews by us, some crews by some other neighbouring utilities in the [United] States they're looking at two months to restore customers."

Grand Bahama Power is a subsidiary of Emera, as is Nova Scotia Power.

Lend and borrow

Irving said despite that,a full complement of crewsare working across Nova Scotia to restore service lost in the storm.

"We, like all utilities, depend on other utilities in the region whenever we get in a storm situation," she said."There's no utility here or in the U.S. that's staffed up to have enough crews to deal with the type of outages we deal with in storms."

Keeping enough staffyear-round to deal with occasionallarge outage events would be uneconomical and increase power rates, Irving said.

"We were able to send a small number of crewswe sent 10 crews to Grand Bahama. But we know we can pull resources from our neighbours, as we always do, and they do the same thing."

NB Power has loaned NSP 14 crews to go with 20 crews from EmeraUtility Services and 36 contracted crews from outside NSP.