And then the lights go out

Throughout Sunday afternoon the lights had flickered occasionally across the city, but at 5:11 pm a wide swath of downtown Prince Rupert was thrown into darkness as a widespread power failure occurred in the downtown core.

The BC Hydro reporting map outlines a stretch of the downtown area from McBride Street to just past 11th street as in the dark, also affected by the main power outage was an area from the waterfront to 7th Avenue West, power was expected to return by 9 pm.
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In a separate outage, a small patch of Atlin Avenue further west where the power went out a close to 6 pm and won't be back on until 11 pm.

Hydro has listed the cause of the downtown power outage as under investigation thus far.

The power outages are just one of many inconveniences that the wind and rain have brought to north coast residents this Sunday, cellular service for Rogers customers has been disrupted all day long, with many theories offered up so far, but few concrete facts as to why the Rogers network has failed.

There were scattered reports of Internet problems through the CityWest system as well, though from all accounts their cel service has remained available through the day.

And for those seeking to travel the highway to the east, plans will have to be put on hold for the near future, the Highways Department closed Highway 16 at Agate creek on Sunday afternoon, as an avalanche hazard was considered too high for travel and extreme weather conditions made driving along the road dangerous as well. Some reports have it that the road won't be re-opened until at least noon on Monday.

Traffic around the city was hampered by large pools of water accumulating in a number of areas, as storm drains clogged and covered by the two weeks of snow couldn't handle the volume of melting snow and rain that began early Sunday morning. Some areas of the city featured large lakes of sorts slowing traffic to a crawl in order to navigate the standing water.

You can find the latest details on some of these troubles through a number of sources.

BC Hydro features a website update site, which includes maps of outages across the province, look over the latest details here.

Drive BC also has a website which offers updates on the troubled areas as well as highway camera views of weather conditions along Highway 16, you can check it out here.

Updates:

Jan 5 3:18 pn Ministry of Highways re-opens Highway 16
Jan 5 10:30 am Highway 16 to remain closed until at least noon today
Jan 4: 7:50 pm Power is reported to have returned to the downtown area at 7:30 this evening