People who live in rural areas of Cape Breton — and those elected to represent them — have long been fed up with frequent power outages.
"(If) we have wind gusts of 50 kilometers an hour, the power is out,” said Cyril MacDonald, District 3 councilor for the Cape Breton Regional Municipality (CBRM).
"Since Fiona, residents have been losing their power (an average) of once a month — and sometimes for hours or days at a time,” said James Edwards, the municipality’s Deputy Mayor.
On Tuesday, representatives from Nova Scotia Power told a packed gallery at CBRM council they will spend more money to address the issue.
"The money we are increasing rates on is definitely going back into reliability," said Matt Drover, the utility’s storm lead.
Drover said they'll spend $45 million this year to remove trees from power lines — up from $20-25 million in previous years for removing vegetation.
"Really focusing on storm-hardening our system, making sure that any trees that were weakened during large hurricanes like Fiona have been removed from our power lines,” Drover said.
MacDonald, whose riding is made up largely of rural communities, said while the lump sum promise is welcome he'd also like to see ratepayers' money spent towards longer-term solutions.
“Begin a regular maintenance plan with sufficient funds to stay on top of this, and maybe in a few years we won't need to have these conversations anymore,” he said.
Edwards added that councilors also took the utility up on an offer of more frequent community meetings about the issue.
"We're looking at arranging one immediately in the Albert Bridge and Louisbourg and Main-à-Dieu areas, so that will be coming up pretty quick here as well," he said.
With some more stormy weather on the way Sunday night into Monday, keeping an eye on outages will be top of mind once again.
While both councilors know a fix will take time, they plan to hold Nova Scotia Power accountable until losing power becomes less frequent.
"Let's hold their feet to the fire and ensure they follow through on this commitment,” MacDonald said.
"We just expect better service from Nova Scotia Power, and the common theme throughout the meeting and throughout the community is that they can do better,” Edwards said.
The utility has said they are recruiting power line technicians from across the country to meet staffing needs to get the job done.