VICTORIA -- Several thousand people on Vancouver Island were without power as winds and heavy snow continued to wreak havoc Wednesday evening.
More than 3,600 residents and businesses on the North Island had lost power as of 3:30 p.m., while 2,600 more on the South Island were also in the dark.
The hardest hit areas were in Sooke, Metchosin, Victoria, Port McNeill, Alert Bay and Tofino.
Many of the outages are still under investigation but the wet and windy weather are the suspected cause, according to BC Hydro.
The outages come after an earlier round of outages that left more than 1,100 hydro customers without power in Victoria around 10 a.m..
Downed trees and dangerous roads were making it difficult for crews to get the power grid up and running again.
Potentially damaging wind gusts of up to 90 km/h, coupled with more overnight snowfall forecasted for the island Wednesday night, are expected to make things more difficult for BC Hydro crews.
The latest information on electricity outages can be found here.
