Flood causes power outage

It turns out a flood in the basement caused the power to be turned off upstairs.

That’s what Hydro One Direct manager Mike Penstone told west end residents gathered at the Parkdale library on Jan. 22, almost a week after they and 20,000 others woke up with no electricity on a frigid Friday morning.

While Hydro One is still investigating why, Penstone said the sprinkler system in the hydro substation at Dufferin St. and Bloor St. West unexpectedly kicked in, dousing a transformer as if it had caught fire. That water eventually drained into a holding tank.

“That holding tank filled up and backed up back into the station,” he said pointing to a large diagram of the station’s floor plan. “Once that water backs up into the station, these floors are not waterproof.

They’re permeable and the water eventually started to fall down onto the equipment that’s owned by Toronto Hydro.”

Hydro crews disconnected the station from the grid since it takes only a small amount of water to compromise the gear, Penstone said.

“What they didn’t want to have happen was Toronto Hydro’s equipment to basically fail and fail badly,” he said. “With (a failure), there would’ve been a much longer outage. So they did it to basically protect the equipment.”

That was also part of the reason why it took so long for electricity to be restored: the equipment was too wet.

The station is now manned 24 hours a day and the fire protection system is going to be replaced, Penstone said.

Area residents have called for an overhaul of Toronto Hydro’s and Hydro One’s communications branches because they felt they were left hung out to dry.

“During the outage, we had answered 45,000 telephone calls from 10 a.m. Thursday to 10 p.m. Friday,” said Blair Peberdy, Toronto Hydro’s vice-president of marketing, communications and public affairs. “The telephone systems that we had were pushed to their call maximum for what they could handle. We’re able to handle about 6,500 calls and hour.”

In the first hours of the blackout, 10,000 calls were placed, causing the system to shut down. Once it rebooted, no calls got through because they were being made simultaneously.

A local man asked why no info was available on the Toronto Hydro or City of Toronto websites.

“The website we did later on in the day, but the reason why we didn’t have it up is because our communications staff were working with news media,” Peberdy said. “The web is a priority for us to work on but I’ll say it’s behind the phone system. Customers have told us that if you don’t have electricity, you don’t have computer access, although some people have wireless.

“They did find that the radio was providing them with more accurate information, so we put the communication resources into radio, television and newspapers.”

When power was partially restored Friday evening, Peberdy said, he was communicating with bloggers and is now looking at ways to incorporate the blogosphere into Toronto Hydro’s communications bureau.

“Actually, by mid-afternoon Friday, information about the blackout was being posted on Twitter,” Councillor Gord Perks said. “Who knew?”

Hepbourne St. resident Arne Nes had knowledge of technology that may have averted the blackout altogether.

“I was a certified high-voltage electrician in Northern Europe,” said Nes, who arrived in Canada just in time for the blackout of 2003. “I have to say I really have the feeling that I’m not really living in a First World industrialized country.”

That’s because the fire protection systems in the substations he worked at in Norway used carbon dioxide gas, the same gas used in many fire extinguishers. And, Nes said, the Norwegian grid was more expansive and less susceptible to outages because there were more substations.

“This setup is doomed the way it is,” he said pointing to the floor plan. “My solution is in the short term, install gas immediately and get rid of the water. In the long term, it’s more expensive but expand the grid so you can feed it to other substations.”