Blackout days in July

JULY 14
9 am

An electrical circuit is shorted in a manhole under the 500 block of Richards Street in downtown Vancouver. The resulting underground fire causes another circuit to fail, and another, and another.

The effects of this power outage have gone far beyond Vancouver.

Nancy Berton, owner of Gardecor Inc., a Colorado-based outdoor products company, said its websites were also down due to the Vancouver outage.

"This is a major economic loss for the day in sales as we are in our peak season," Berton wrote in an e-mail.
BC Hydro said the outage is affecting about 4,400 customers. However, some of those customers are large office towers, so the number of offices affected was believed to be much greater.

Restaurants that had to throw out perishable inventory were hardest hit by the power failure, says the Canadian Federation of Independent Business.

The CFIB estimates about 4,800 small businesses in downtown Vancouver lost power, and that group alone suffered a financial hit totalling $36 million.