substation at heart of days-long cape breton power outage: nova scotia power
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electrical workers replace a utility pole on farrell street in dartmouth wednesday may 28, 2025.
tim krochak
/
the chronicle herald
several communities on the western side of cape breton had power restored sunday evening after a lengthy weekend outage.
“there was an outage that started saturday afternoon impacting about 11,000 customers across parts of cape breton,” jacqueline foster, a communications adviser with nova scotia power, said monday.
“crews identified an issue at the whycocomagh substation and were able to get a large portion of customers back on within about three and half hours.”
foster said a mobile transformer was brought in to support efforts in restoring power to the remaining 3,000 customers in the whycocomagh area.
“they were restored late sunday afternoon.”
in order to accomplish that, foster said a second outage was required for all customers affected by saturday’s interruption.
“that emergency outage allowed crews to finish the work required to safely restore power to everyone,” she said. “we are sorry for the inconvenience this caused some of our customers.”
customers frustrated: deputy warden
lynn chisholm, the deputy warden of inverness county and the district representative for the port hood and mabou areas, said she had a busy day sunday, fielding calls from frustrated nova scotia power customers while shepherding three grandchildren aged 10 and under.
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chisholm said she had several conversations with the company on sunday and was told it was a substation issue.
chisholm said it was an outage that covered an extensive distance from mabou to iona on the bras d’or lake, a distance of some 70 kilometres.
“that’s what they explained to me.”
chisholm said she heard two different time predictions from nova scotia power about when the electricity would be restored but some didn’t have power back until nearly 8 p.m. on sunday.
“the last isolation of all of that map outage was down in the east lake ainslie area,” she said.
chisholm said the span of time for the outage in the area was 29 hours.
“others were 24 hours but the main map outage from the beginning was for 24, 25 hours before they got it back.”
chisholm said her family did not lose power in port hood but, down highway 19 in mabou, where she grew up, electricity was not available for hours.
the power outage came on a busy tourism and festival weekend for inverness county residents, businesses and communities.
the deputy warden said she and her grandchildren attended the parade in inverness on sunday to wrap up the week-long inverness gathering and stopped at the glenora inn and distillery restaurant on the way home.
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“we just left the (distillery) building when the power went out,” chisholm said.
without power, glenora inn and other businesses had to fire up generators.
“for places like the red shoe (pub in mabou), they shut down, they lost an evening of revenue, which is unfortunate,” chisholm said.
she said the 67th annual broad cove concert, a popular event held just north of the village of inverness, also went on with generated power and was a huge success.
the mabou farmers market did likewise but not all amenities were available.
“my thought about nova scotia power is that if you had a substation issue that went down, are you checking on these, does something just go out like a light bulb? i don’t know.”
new transformer needed
chisholm said the power company told her that once the issue had been identified, it had to procure another transformer and get that transported from another location, which took a considerable amount of time.
“then they had to isolate this entire area,” she said. “they were working all night, through the night. this was a major issue with a substation. is this going to happen again? that’s my concern.”
chisholm said she had calls from many angry nsp customers sunday.
“it was frustrating for a lot of people and the timing is not great because people are already upset and angry about the cyber attack, their information out there, and it’s just a double whammy with this stuff.
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“even to have a generator going all day like that in the summer, to keep food (frozen) it set people foolish in the middle of a hot day to have a generator going, and all night long.”
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