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Toronto, About 23,000 Toronto Hydro customers remain in the dark following Friday’s wind storm and the utility says that is “working around the clock” to restore power to those individuals.
The wind storm toppled trees and downed down power lines as it moved through the city on Friday afternoon, leavings tens of thousands without power.
As of 11 p.m. about 68,000 Toronto Hydro customers were still without power but by 5:30 a.m. on Saturday that number was down to 21,000. By 9:30 a.m. that number had, however, risen to 29,000 due to additional outages being reported, though it has since gone down again.
Toronto Hydro says that it is giving priority to the roughly 400 reports of fallen wires for now due to concerns for public safety. The utility also says that it expects some customers without power will “have damage to their equipment” and will have to contact an electrician to repair that damage before power can be restored.
“This really was an extraordinary event that we really haven’t seen since the 2013 ice storm,” Toronto Hydro spokesperson Brian Buchan told CP24 on Saturday morning. “We have all our crews coming in that are available and we are hoping to get most people back today but there is going to be some outages that continue.”
More than 900 outages
Buchan said that at one point on Friday there were more than 900 individual outages, which is roughly double the number of out outages seen during the ice storm that hit the city last month.
In the face of widespread outages extra resources were called in but Buchan said that the winds initially prevented crews from beginning work on restoring power.
“We have heard that there were gusts up to 115 km/h and I have heard other reports even higher than that,” he said. “What we know is that when it gets above 60 km/h it becomes very hazardous for our crews working in bucket trucks.
Outages most prevalent in west end
Buchan said that while the outages were scattered across the city, they were particularly prevalent in the west end of the city.
One resident near Belfied Road and Highway 27 in Etobicoke told CP24 on Saturday morning that he lost power at around 4 p.m. on Friday and has not gotten it back since.
The resident also said that the heavy winds toppled a tree on his property, damaging a vehicle parked in his driveway in the process.
“It reminds me of when we had the blackout about 15 years ago. You put out candles but otherwise what can you do,” Douglas Smith said. “The freezer is still fine, the food is still fine and what can you do. You just have to keep on going.”
Downed wires have resulted in road closures
The heavy winds on Friday uprooted trees and downed power wires, resulting in a number of road closures that still remain in effect.
On Saturday morning police said that Mount Pleasant Road was closed north of Belize Drive due to some downed wires.
Police said that while hydro crews have been advised of the issue, it may be several hours until they arrive on scene due to a heavy backlog of calls.
Speaking with reporters at a community cleanup event in North York on Saturday, Mayor John Tory said that the damage from the storm could have been much worse.
“When you have winds that are almost hurricane force and are extraordinary by any measure for decades you are going to have things like this happen and I think actually last night the damaged was minimized,” he said. “Our crews – hydro, police and fire – did a super job getting things back towards normal as quickly as possible and of course work is still going on today.”
Tory said that the city has “some work to do” in examining the response of its emergency services call centres, which were “under huge stress” during the storm.
He said that luckily the damage from the storm does not appear to be significant, given the wind speeds that were recorded.
“There are places where there was damge done – intersections. hydro poles, I saw quite a few traffic lights all twisted around – but fortunately there is nothing really serious,” he said.
Power mostly restored in York Region
In York Region Alectra says that they have restored power to all but 4,800 of the 100,000 customers that were affected and in Durham Region Veridan Connections says that about 9,300 customers remain without power, down from about 13,000 late Friday night and
Meanwhile, Hydro One says that there are about 190,000 customers that remain without power province-wide, down from 370,000 on Friday.
“It has impacted both the distribution and also the transmission system. The winds caused down wires but there was also an impact on vegetation with trees and what not that are flying and causing poles to break and wires to come down and so on,” Hydro One’s Executive Vice President of Customer and Corporate Affairs Ferio Pugliese told CP24.
Pugliese told CP24 that he expects power to be restored to “a significant portion” of affected customers by tonight.
