Hydro One: More than 20,000 still without power after windstorm

Toronto Hydro says power has been restored to the vast majority of customers after strong winds knocked out power across the city.

“I’m pleased to say that crews worked throughout the night and actually I’m kind of astonished to say that we are down to 110 customers at this point,” Buchan told CP24 early Thursday morning.

As of 11 a.m., that number was reduced to 70.

The high winds wreaked havoc across the city Wednesday, uprooting trees and mangling a construction crane in Mississauga.

The wind also knocked out power to about 21,000 Toronto Hydro customers.

“We called in all of our crews. The incident happened during the day so we had the ability to get all hands on deck and start to restore power to people,” Buchan said.

“One of the big problems though was that the winds were persistent well into the evening so that’s really difficult for our crews to get up in a bucket truck with the wind whipping around like that.”

Buchan said he expects crews will be able to turn the lights back on for most of the 110 customers who are still without power at some point today.

“I think at this point about half of them are individual customers and what happens sometimes is some damage from the trees from the high winds then hurt the customer-owned equipment and that has to be repaired as well,” he said.

“So the restoration is kind of dependent on a number of factors for those individuals.”

In Mississauga and Hamilton, Alectra Utilities said that at the height of the wind storm, about 15,000 clients were without power and in Vaughan, about 10,000 customers were in the dark.

The utility company said power was restored to Vaughan at around 4 p.m. Wednesday and the power would likely be back on for all of its customers by late Wednesday night or early Thursday morning.

Hydro One says approximately 20,600 customers of the 175,000 impacted by the storm remain without power.