Workers braved bitter cold to help end Christmastime blackout

A75-page report, delivered in June 2014, found the company’s restoration work adequate — even heroic in some cases — and well within industry norms.

But it also made 25 recommendations intended to improve a response to any future outage of that magnitude, says Dan Smart, head of Grid Emergency Management with the utility. Among these was the creation of his department. The report “completely changed the way we look at emergency management,” Smart says. “We now have some dedicated resources that are focused on emergency preparedness and emergency management . . . to optimize how we respond to these kinds of events.”

Smart says his department has assigned emergency roles to many of the company’s employees, which they’ve trained to take on in the event of another mass outage.

“When push comes to shove and we have an emergency, we can call on these people, and they’re really comfortable in what they need to do.”

The report also recommended the system supply more accessible and accurate information to customers about the probable duration of their outages.

“That’s the information you need to know in order to make decisions,” Smart says. “Is this going to be two hours and I’m just going to weather it, or do I need to go somewhere else?”

The company developed a strategy that would send more people out to assess problems in various parts of the city and make informed estimates about the amount of time it would take to fix them.

It has also installed stronger communications hardware that could better han- dle the telephone and website inquiries that flood in during a widespread outage.

“We were just overwhelmed with the volume,” Smart says.

“So we’ve done a lot of work through system upgrades and through some arrangements with overflow service providers to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”

Since the storm, Toronto Hydro has also forged broader mutual aid agreements with other large utilities.

“We’ve sent people down to the States and to other Canadian companies, and our expectation and their obligations are to support us in our time of need,” Smart says.

The fulfilment of other recommendations has been more mixed, Smart admits.

For example, virtually all the power outages were due to ice-covered trees and branches falling onto power lines.

The panel report said the system might look at better “vegetation management” strategies and at burying more of the vul- nerable overhead lines.

But the utility’s desire to further trim back trees is often at odds with the city forest department’s wish for a broad, healthy canopy, Smart says.

“And people don’t like it when we come by and lop off all the branches down their street,” Smart says.

“So I think we’ve made some tweaks here and there to our (trimming) program, but I don’t think the program has changed dramatically.”

As for burying lines, Smart says it presents its own problems, including the risk of flooding or breakages due to digging.

During the storm, some 98 per cent of the company’s staff was on the job for the Christmas holiday repair efforts, often working in the bitter cold.

“They really accept and embrace the fact that the role they play in a situation like this . . . has a huge impact on people’s lives,” Smart says.

The hundreds of thousands in the GTA who spent a powerless Christmas four years ago can attest to that.