Midnight revelry cut short after rogue balloons cause power outage in Yaletown

It was an unusually dark and quiet Friday night in Vancouver's Yaletown area.

The popular downtown district, which is usually busy with crowds of people dining and socializing, was almost completely deserted around midnight after an unexpected power outage.

BC Hydro field crews said the outage was caused by some runaway balloons that got tangled in a power line.

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The lack of electricity meant an early night for some service workers in the district.

Line cook Ethan Milne works at a restaurant on Hamilton Street. He said the night was running smoothly until everything went dark.

"Suddenly everything just shut down and people started yelling," said Milne.

"I've never seen this before, but apparently this has happened once recently, apparently in the past year."

One of Milne's partners said that an outage in Yaletown last year was also caused by loose balloons.

A two-person BC Hydro crew managed to find what was left of the balloons in front of a restaurant on Mainland Street.

They were able to take them down safely and start working on repairing the affected power lines shortly after.

The crews restored power to the area just before 1 a.m. local time.

However, most of the patrons had left the area by then.