by There’s been a big jump in the number of Cape Breton customers without power in the wake of yesterday’s freezing rain.
Nearly 4-thousand customers from outside Homeville to the Mira area to Forchu are now offline.
Nova Scotia Power says the outage was caused by damage to its transmission equipment and the estimated restoration time is 4:00 this afternoon.
The outage has led to the cancellation of three schools in the Cape Breton Victoria Regional School Board.
The Board says students at Riverside Elementary, George D. Lewis School in Louisbourg and Marion Bridge School are being dismissed at noon.
Meanwhile, there are still more than two dozen, small scattered power outages throughout the Regional Municipality.