A few blocks from my house is the Capilano substation. A few years ago, on November 17, 2015, I was driving home after helping spawn some sockeye salmon out at the Cultus Lake Salmon Research Laboratory. The wind had been howling all day and, out at the lab, before lunch, the power had gone out and the lab went onto generator backup. It largely didn’t matter much to what we were doing since we were working outside sorting and spawning fish.
We could hear trees crashing down in the forest around us, and we were definitely looking over our shoulders between fish. When we had all the eggs fertilized, we poured an iodine based disinfectant over them and left them for an hour to go get lunch, except we couldn’t get lunch because the golf course pub, where we always go to eat, was without power as well…because a tree had come down across the power lines and brought down a couple of power poles up the road from where we turn into the lab.
There were live power lines on the road to the other direction, but some firemen guided us out of the lab parking lot and past the lines to a lot just down the road. From there we walked back along the creek and in a side gate to bet back onto the lab grounds where we finished rinsing and planting the eggs into the incubators.
However…once we were finished, we couldn’t get out on the main road to get back to the highway. Fortunately, one in our group knew of a gravel backroad that led, in a highly convoluted manner, out of the Cultus Lake area and back to the road into Chilliwack and which allowed us all to get home that day.
Once back on the highway it was a wild ride back home. The wind did its best to toss the truck around and, as the sun went down, I was glad to be almost home.
A few hundred metres off the highway, in a small clearing on the edge of Murdo Frazer Park, lies the Capilano substation, which was built in the 1950s and serves approximately 12,000 homes from base of Grouse Mountain, south to 1st Street, west to Capilano Road, and east to Lonsdale Avenue.
As I was roughly parallel to the substation…a few hundred metres from it…it gave in to the winds and blew.
….it was like the apocalypse had arrived!
The entire world around me lit up in the most incredible, apocalyptic blue flash of light…..and then the world turned completely and utterly black. I was utterly blinded for a moment.
I am grateful that I’m not a jumpy person.
If my mother had been driving I have some confidence that we would have gone straight into the ditch at that moment.
I knew my exit was just a few hundred metres ahead and that the road is dead straight until I needed to turn, so my eyes had a few moments to adjust before I needed to do anything…..foot off the gas…no stupid quick moves….just let things settle down and adjust….
I’d had a small car tailgating me for the past few minutes and he didn’t back off as I took to off ramp….where I got another surprise, but he got an even bigger surprise because he was so close that he didn’t have any time to see what I saw just before encountering the next little bit of excitement…..
As I came off the highway there was a small tree that had fallen across the road…more of a large branch really, just the top end of a small poplar. It was a bump and a rattle for me in the truck….but the head lights behind me lights back waaaay off my back bumper when that bounced back up underneath that car on my tail.
That’ll teach him not to tailgate….. 🙂
My eyes had adjusted to the darkness by the time I came down to Capilano Road and took the corner to head up the few blocks to home. But, as I crested the hill at Ridgewood, I took my foot off the gas and applied the brakes…. because I could not for the life of me figure out what my headlights were illuminating on the road in front of me…something circular and bright was careening across the road crazily. It took a few moments, but I eventually figured out that my headlights were lighting up the inside of someone’s garbage pail that had been taken on a wild ride by the high winds.
A few more blocks and I turned into the driveway and walked into the house where Kirk looked at me and said “The power just went out!”
I laughed and said something along the lines of “No shit…. and let me tell you why….”
When that substation blew up it apparently lit up the sky over the North Shore and some pretty awesome photos/video clips were captured from downtown.
What are the blue flashes happening in Vancouver harbor? @CBCVancouver @CityofVancouver pic.twitter.com/TM8Wp0rPwL
— Sean Wilson (@SeanDGwilson) November 18, 2015
Wind gusts recorded at Point Atkinson in West Vancouver that afternoon/evening were around 100 kilometres per hour, and made a mess out of the heavily forested North Shore. At the peak of the storm around 6 p.m…about the time I experienced what felt like the end of the world, 110,000 customers were without power in the Lower Mainland, Fraser Valley and Vancouver Island. The North Shore was particularly hard hit with around 20,000 customers out in North Vancouver. By the next morning, around 15,000 homes on the North Shore were still in the dark, most of them due to the Capilano substation event.
Yesterday, when we were out for our walk and went by the substation at the edge of the park, the memory of that eventful drive home came back and so we stopped by for a few shots before heading out towards the Valley to visit a garden centre.
Different day…different apocalypse…
(165/365)
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