Power to remain out until next Friday for some on P.E.I.

Some on Prince Edward Island will be without power for another week, meaning some Islanders will have been without electricity for three-quarters of a month.

The latest estimate from Maritime Electric, the Island’s main power utility, shows electricity won’t be completely restored until Oct. 14.

Thousands of people have already been in the dark for two weeks.

Restoration efforts are taking four to five times longer than after Hurricane Dorian in 2019.

“It’s taking longer than they had anticipated,” said Maritime Electric spokesperson Kim Griffin. “Sometimes the damage is worse. Sometimes they might need more poles, or they may need just additional spans of wire. It just depends, but on average, that’s how much longer it’s taking.”

There was some confusion on the Island late Thursday, when the outage map, which had dropped to nearly 8,000, suddenly jumped to about 11,000.

“We drove around P.E.I. with our metre readers and started to take that information, and try to ping to try to figure out if we were accurate in our estimates for individual outages,” said Griffin. “What we’ve been able to find out is that we had more individual outages than we thought we had.”

The vast majority of about 9,000 remaining outages are individual outages, just a few people or even just a single house without power.

“It’s the opposite of Dorian,” said Griffin. “We had bigger numbers on the transmission side and were able to get them back on, but now it’s taking us longer on the individual side.”

Perhaps surprising, a home in Charlottetown, that sustained significant damage, still has power.

“The front mess is obvious, other than that she’s fine,” said Jim Farrell, speaking about his mother-in-law’s home. “She didn’t lose power, well, we all lost power, but she didn’t have any long-standing issues with it.”

Farrell didn’t get off so easy, his home hasn’t been plugged into the grid since the storm. It’s the only one left on his street, but he does have a generator.

He’s lived in the house for 35 years, and says he’s never seen anything like this.

“Longest power we ever had out maybe was, maybe, 12-15 hours, somewhere in there,” said Farrell. “Certainly not two weeks.”

The provincial Emergency Measures Organization issued a warning Friday afternoon that messy weather this weekend could knock down more trees and blow existing debris into roadways. That could further set back restoration efforts.