NB Power says it still hopes to have power restored across the province before Christmas.
But the vice president of operations admits that might not be the case for all of the outages.
“Those that are the small number of customers, so the one and twos … the only ones that could potentially be long, I would say, would be those,” Nicole Poirier said during a news conference on Thursday afternoon.
More than 21,000 homes and businesses remained without electricity across the province as of 4:30 p.m. Thursday.
That was down from the more than 100,000 customers who lost power at the peak of the outages.
The Charlotte/Southwest, Central York/Sunbury and Carleton regions continued to see the bulk of the outages.
According to the estimated restoration times, many of the impacted customers should have their power restored by late Saturday.
Poirier said while crews have been making steady progress, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done.
“There are more than 800 people working across the province, including 340 field crews, which make up internal and external crews. This also includes an additional 111 crews that joined us today from outside the province,” she said.
As crews restore power in other parts of the province, Poirier said they are being moved to the hardest-hit areas to help with the restoration efforts there.
Meanwhile, the provincial utility defended its vegetation management strategy in the wake of the outages, which were largely caused by falling trees.
Poirier said trimming trees back from power lines has been a priority for the utility and will continue to be in the future.
“We’ve spent over $120 million in the past nine years on vegetation management, but as we all know, we have a lot of trees in New Brunswick,” she said.
Poirier said the utility has proposed additional vegetation management spending in its upcoming budgets, which are set to go before the Energy and Utilities Board in the new year.
3:30 PM UPDATE: 340 crews are participating in restoration efforts, including private contractors and crews from other jurisdictions. The whole restoration team, over 800 people strong, has one goal: restoring power to all New Brunswickers by Christmas. (1/3)
— NB Power (@NB_Power) December 21, 2023
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