Thousands of BC Hydro customers on Vancouver Island and the Sunshine Coast are without power as a storm system moves through the region.
BC Hydro was reporting more than 19,000 customers without power on the North Island, with crews responding to nearly 50 outages. Almost 3,000 customers on the South Island were also without power as of Friday.
In Powell River, more than 2,000 customers were affected by an outage, while another 2,000-plus customers were without power in Pender Harbour.
BC Hydro said most of the outages were caused by trees falling onto power lines.
Environment Canada has issued rainfall warnings for parts of the B.C. coast. It says this is the first potent storm in a series of wet and windy weather systems expected to affect the coast into next week.
