No power, no water and a flooded basement
Ontario has banned the drastic practice of cutting electricity service during the winter months and ordered some 900 dark customers be reconnected.
One wonders, with a little horror: Are there actually people out there surviving an Ottawa winter without power?
Yes, and in ways that might shock you.
The man sure shocked me. His hydro was cut off 10 months ago. It’s a long, long story, and he doesn’t want his identity revealed, but suffice to say his finances are a mess and — simply put — he doesn’t follow rules very well, including paying an overdue $600 bill. He has, in fact, problems galore, seemingly at war with every “system” out there. (Legal, social services, banking, bylaw, income support, electrical.)
Here’s how bad it is: because he has no power and lives on a rural property, his well pump is knocked out and he has no running water, hot or cold. Also dead is the sump pump, resulting in a major flood in the basement.
He heats one room in the brick bungalow with a propane fireplace, the kind with a glass door and fake logs. Except he took the door off and removed the logs so he could boil water in a kettle, which is jet black. Given the oily scent in the air, it’s a miracle the fumes haven’t killed him.
“It heats the house so I don’t freeze to death,” he says. It would work better with the fan, of course, but that’s electric. (Yet he has a sense of humour and a razor-sharp memory: “I’ll put a Betty Crocker (cake) on top of the fireplace. Takes five days to cook.”)
His regular phone was disconnected, so he’s hooked up a wonky cellphone to a truck battery in the living room, which looks like a hoarder’s paradise. At night, he uses flashlights, including a head lamp.
Middle-aged, he hurt himself in a car accident, then a serious fall, to the point he is unable to work or do much manual labour. And he is largely housebound, without a vehicle, stuck about 12 kilometres from a grocery store, with nothing but a bicycle.
Water? When I visited, it was a warmish day and snow was melting off the roof and dripping into the eavestrough, which he had MacGyvered so that the runoff went into pails. Don’t even ask about the toilet.
The noose is tightening around him, including the threat to seize the house for unpaid bills. Yet he refuses to consider selling and moving.
“They’re not going to do this to us. This is our family home, to keep us off the streets,” he said. “What am I supposed to do? Give up on our family home that we built with our own two hands? We shouldn’t be forced out.”
He is, certainly, not typical of the customers who run into payment problems with electricity bills, of which there are many.
Hydro Ottawa had 324,000 customers at the start of 2016. Of those, more than 38,000 were in arrears with payments and, throughout 2015, nearly 7,000
What am I supposed to do? Give up on our family home that we built with our own two hands? We shouldn’t be forced out.
were disconnected.
Disconnecting service is considered a last resort for the utility.
It offers equal billing, for instance, to ease payments in the higher-consuming months, “arrears payment agreements,” and has a couple of programs for low-income customers, including one that provides a one-time $500 grant, with reconnection payment forgiveness, and a long repayment horizon.
“In short,” says Hydro, “we do everything we can to communicate that we’re here to help.”
It also says that during winter months (Dec. 15 to March 15), it will not fully disconnect
residential customers who are in arrears and have no repayment plan. Instead, it uses a timer that switches power on for 30 minutes, then off for 2 1/2 hours. “This cycling mitigates unacceptable safety risks to the customer.”
It also says it suspends “all disconnection activity” during periods of extreme cold or heat.
Late last week, the Ontario Energy Board ordered the province’s utilities to reconnect all 930 customers cut off this winter and asked that 3,000 “load limiters” be removed.
My powerless friend had his juice cut off last May or April. Whatever has happened to keep him that way — and however difficult he is to deal with — it does seem inhumane to leave a marginal person alone in a house with no electricity, thus no water, during the coldest months of the year.
He, apparently, has no access to family support. It does not help he’s stubborn as a mule and sees the world as pitted against him.
Hydro Ottawa alone disconnects 7,000 people in a year. Some navigate the system; some, obviously, don’t.
What other acts of desperation, or electric attempts at survival, go unnoticed?