Two owners of an East Vancouver business are asking for restitution from BC Hydro after they said they were forced to close down for a day while Hydro completed some work in the area.

However, no work was ever completed.

Rebecca and Wayne Bertrand own the Laughing Bean Coffee on Hastings Street and they said in early March they received a visit from two BC Hydro representatives saying they will lose power and will need to close from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on March 11 while work was done in the area.

Twelve small businesses and 10 residential customers would be affected by the outage, and the Bertrands said they decided to close for the whole day instead.

“It’s pretty much your bread and butter, that’s a long time to go without,” said Rebecca of the timing of the closure.

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They prepared by cancelling deliveries, taking items home and powering down the freezers.

“This isn’t just closing your door because it’s Christmas Day,” said Rebecca.

“It was a pain in the butt.”

All the staff lost a day’s pay as well.

On March 11, Rebecca said she decided to stop by around midday to see how the work was going. But when she arrived she found there were no trucks in the alley behind the restaurant and no one was working.

“I come inside, all the power’s on,” she said. “I call BC Hydro, and the lady says ‘well your notice does say in case of inclement weather the work will not happen.’ I said ‘I don’t know where you are, but look outside, it’s sunny and 11 degrees’.”

She said she asked for a supervisor to contact them, and they told her they were confused as to why she would think their business would need to close for BC Hydro to complete the work. Rebecca said it was because two representatives from BC Hydro told them to prepare and gave them a notice.

Wayne said he has talked to BC Hydro several times about what happened.

“It’s not acceptable. Something’s has to happen, you can’t just shuffle it away in a file,” he said.

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BC Hydro spokesperson Simi Heer said it is important to remember that planned outages are a necessary part of performing upgrades to the system.

“This situation wasn’t ideal,” she said of what happened on March 11. “So some things happened not according to plan. In this case when we sent out the notification to our customers letting them know that the outage was going to happen, we did indicate that work would be weather dependent. On the morning of the outage our contractor made the call that the work couldn’t be done with the conditions that day.”

“Regardless of the reason though, these customers should have been notified that day, they should have been told that the outage wasn’t going to happen and that follow up piece simply didn’t happen. So of course we apologize for that and we will follow up with those customers to make sure that they have the information that they need.”

Heer said the call to cancel the work was based on the weather and the contractor said he could not stop and start the job, which needed eight hours to complete.

However, the job will now be completed without any power outages at all.

She said the contractor returned to the site last week and completed one part of the work without a power outage. There is one more part to be completed, which will happen later this week, and that will not require a power outage.

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“I do appreciate their disappointment and frustration with this situation,” she said. “We do have a claims process in place so they are able to submit a claim to BC Hydro and our claims team will asses that claim based on the specifics of the situation and then make that determination.”