A few pockets of people remained without power in the Cowichan Valley on Monday morning after a windstorm swept across Southern Vancouver Island Sunday night.
In total 5,000 customers lost electricity at the height of the outage.
"Shawnigan Lake area was hit very hard," said B.C. Hydro spokesperson Ted Olynyk. "We had a number of trees coming down on top of lines, we had about 10 spans of lines down, broken poles in areas."
"Of course when we get storms on the South Island, Shawnigan Lake, the nature of the geography, it's going to be hit hard. The wind funnels down," he explained.
On the southern Island as a whole almost 20,000 customers lost power. BC Hydro brought in crews from the Mainland to help restore power, and 20 crews worked to get things back up and running in Cowichan.
"We knew it was going to be big," Olynyk said of the storm, which intensified as it approached.
This meant Hydro was prepared, but predicting the exact path a storm will take is tough, making identifying where outages will occur before the do almost impossible.
"We don't know until it happens," he said.