Environment Canada has issued wind warnings for certain areas in British Columbia, including the Lower Mainland, Vancouver Island, and the southern Gulf Islands. A low-pressure system is causing strong gusts of up to 90 km/h in parts of Metro Vancouver and Vancouver Island, expected to continue until Sunday morning. These warnings are issued by Environment Canada when there is a significant risk of damage from high winds, potentially leading to power outages.
Additionally, snowfall warnings have been issued for the Coquihalla Highway between Hope and Merritt, as well as a mountainous section of Highway 3 in the B.C. Interior. B.C. Hydro is currently addressing multiple outages in the Lower Mainland and on Vancouver Island due to fallen trees affecting power lines, impacting thousands of customers.
In southeast Vancouver, more than 3,000 customers are without power as of Saturday afternoon, with crews investigating an outage in the Victoria-Fraserview neighborhood. Furthermore, an outage caused by fallen trees in Esquimalt on Vancouver Island has left over 1,800 customers without power. Environment Canada had previously warned about potential flooding from a fall storm system hitting the B.C. coast, leading to the cancellation of ferry sailings and rising water levels.
On Friday, eight individuals had to be rescued near Port Hardy on northern Vancouver Island following flash flooding that stranded vehicles due to debris blocking a road in both directions.