POWER TO THE PEOPLE
How Hydro Ottawa weathered its ‘worst-case scenario’ and got (most of) the lights back on. David Reevely goes behind the scenes.
As electricity started flowing into blacked-out neighbourhoods Sunday night, Hydro Ottawa’s brass watched screens in their Merivale Road command centre.
Besides experts monitoring the capital’s power system at workstations, the utility ’s functional headquarters has social-media feeds up where everybody can see them. In normal times, when technicians and engineers haven’t spent two days figuring out how to work around a tornado-blasted transmission station to restore power to tens of thousands of Ottawans, they often give Hydro Ottawa the first alert when a transformer’s blown or a wire’s broken.
Sunday, Hydro Ottawa’s chief executive and his lieutenants were looking for good news.
“We sat back for two minutes and said we knew it was working, but we were waiting for the response. And in this day and age that’s on Twitter and we were watching people say, ‘Hey! we’ve got power!’ ‘It’s back on!’” said Bryce Conrad, wearily, on Monday morning.
A short walk up the road, the Merivale transmission station was in ruins. A thousand megawatts, about the output of two nuclear reactors, ordinarily runs through it. Merivale is one of two places where Ottawa’s city power grid plugs into the provincial power supply from Hydro One.
According to Hydro One, which operates it, a roof blew off a building and crashed into the transformers that split the incoming electricity and send it out again to individual neighbourhoods. Much of western and southern Ottawa lost power all at once.
“Even on a bad day when you get 20,000 or 30,000 people out, it’s usually a very manageable thing,” Conrad said. “Normally we can get power restored by putting up poles, replacing conductor (wires). It’s frustrating, it takes time, but you know what you’re doing.
“This was pretty much a worstcase scenario.”
The weather forecast on Friday gave reasons to worry: after rain in the morning and daytime heat, Environment Canada projected wind gusts of up to 100 km/h in late afternoon.
“We sent home our 24/7 crew in the morning, just because we had a sneaking suspicion we might need to bring them in and have them fully rested and ready to go Friday evening,” Conrad said. When Hydro Ottawa workers came in from routine jobs late in the day, managers asked them not to go home, just in case. “At that point in time we probably would have had 50 or 60 of our crew fuelling up the trucks and ready to go. It’s not something we do lightly.”
Late in the afternoon, the official tornado warning came.
“Literally the alarm went off on all our cellphones from Environment Canada,” Conrad said.
And then as the storm burst through the city, with one tornado touching down in Dunrobin and another tearing a path near Hunt Club Road from Highway 416 to Greenboro, Hydro Ottawa’s screens started lighting up bad.
“There’s not a whole lot we can do as the weather hits,” Conrad said. “It just kept climbing ... obviously we lost the big supply from Merivale, and after you’ve lost that supply … it’s just a cascading effect, especially across the western and southern areas. It’s sort of eerie, just watching it as it grows and grows. Everything is going the wrong way.
“We’ve got reports of broken poles, we’ve got a crew on Colonnade Road when the tornado comes through, and they’re right there watching the poles snap,” Conrad said.
The held-back workers started rolling in their trucks from four Hydro Ottawa work centres, answering the first calls.
“It becomes a very militaristic operation,” Conrad said.
The scale of the devastation became clear quickly, and not just in Ottawa. Conrad’s counterpart at Toronto’s Alectra Utilities sent him a text — from a trip to California — offering help. Conrad took him up on it.
“Typically we get way more volunteers than we’re able to send,” said Alectra vice-president Chris Hudson, who’s in charge of its network.
Friday, the company sent 18 workers to reinforce roughly 130 Hydro Ottawa crew members. It’s Alectra’s fourth such deployment in the last year-and-a-half.
“Hydro Ottawa helped out in Brampton in 2013, when we had an ice storm there,” Hudson said. “We’re really happy to be able to send help back.”
This kind of mutual aid is routine in the power business: Fourteen of Hydro Ottawa’s workers just got back from a similar assignment to the southeastern United States, rebuilding the power grid hit by Hurricane Florence. Hudson said more extreme weather means the number of calls for cross-border help is increasing.
Other utilities offered to help, too, but by Saturday it was clear that Ottawa’s biggest problem was the Merivale station. Conrad said he asked fellow hydro bosses to send their crews to Hydro One’s aid, not Ottawa’s. The provincial utility had nearly 200,000 of its own customers in darkness; if its workers could be freed up, Hydro One could devote more attention to either repairing the Merivale station or working around it.
“We, in fact, reached out to Hydro One and offered our station electricians and said, ‘Anything you want, anything you need. We’ve got distribution, but if we don’t have supply, nobody ’s powering up their iPhones’,” Conrad said.
HUNGRY FOR INFORMATION
Just after the tornadoes hit, Conrad said the damage was as bad as Hydro Ottawa suffered in the 1998 ice storm. He qualifies that a little. The ice storm was bad and this is bad, but they’re different. Much of the damage in 1998 was in rural Ottawa; this storm’s damage is more urban. The damage this time is more extensive, but it also happened fast and then it was done.
“The issue with the ice storm was no sooner would you put a pole back up but another tree would fall and take it down again,” Conrad said.
Repair crews were working by early Friday evening and continued all night and through Saturday and Sunday. “Our guys are banging away doing everything they can. They’re putting in poles, we had 80-some poles down, we had (wires) down. I mean, it was a disaster,” Conrad said.
By law, they could only work double shifts, not around the clock. “Some of them were just sleeping on couches, sleeping in trucks in the garage. The god’s honest truth is they’d still be working if we didn’t send them home.”
What Hydro Ottawa was doing poorly was explaining to its customers where it, and they, stood. The company’s website has a page devoted to outages but it fell apart early. The map of the city showing blacked-out areas wouldn’t load and a list of outages went screwy. By Saturday morning, at one moment it said the city had 154 separate outages affecting 143,000 customers. Then 39 outages affecting 60,000 customers. Refresh the page, get a whole new set of numbers.
“It just failed. There’s no other word for it,” Conrad said. The website got a year’s worth of hits in a day and wasn’t up to the job. The underlying database of information was in bad shape, too, plagued by cellular-data failures and the very power outages it’s supposed to track.
“That’s an area we need to improve dramatically going forward,” Conrad said. The next time something like this happens, Hydro Ottawa will be better prepared to communicate, he promised.
Where Hydro Ottawa couldn’t keep up, city councillors stepped in. In blacked-out Barrhaven, Coun. Jan Harder tweeted all weekend about where people could get food, charge phones, take warm showers.
In Kitchissippi, Coun. Jeff Leiper put up an online map of outages for people to edit themselves, in place of Hydro Ottawa’s, which shocked even him with its popularity.
“I don’t fully understand the reaction to that. It was something I’m going to be thinking about ... the power of residents connecting with each other through the conduit of those updates,” Leiper said Monday.
Councillors also got briefings Saturday and Sunday about where Hydro Ottawa stood, which they shared on social media and by personally walking and driving around and talking to people.
“Residents were resilient. They took the news as it trickled out in the spirit in which it was given, and that’s, sort of, cautious optimism. So I had almost no residents reaching out to me to say, ‘ Where the hell is my power?’” Leiper said. “My gut reaction to the information we (councillors) were getting from Hydro was it was professional, it was credible, and it was honest. And that’s what we needed.”
Above all, he’s happy with how quickly electricity was restored. Word on Saturday was that it could take many days.
“I had no expectation that the power was going to be on at this point,” Leiper said Monday. “I am surprised that they were able to get that work undertaken and get us up on power this weekend.”
THE SOLUTION, AND NEW WORRIES
Hydro One and Hydro Ottawa worked on bypassing the Merivale station all weekend. The other big Hydro One station at Hawthorne Road would pick up some of Merivale’s load. Other Hydro Ottawa substations would share the rest. Each had to be inspected for damage to make sure it could handle up to double its usual flow of power. They’d thought they’d be ready around noon on Sunday but they kept finding new damage, new problems. The target kept getting pushed.
“We finally started to get some of that supply trickling in around 8 (p.m.),” Conrad said. “We started to slowly but surely push it into our system. We were literally sitting in our command centre watching the stations come online. We had electricians in each of our stations ready to throw switches.”
The substation at Longfields in south Nepean was first.
“We knew Barrhaven would be a good place to go because there was no damage there, it was just a lack of supply,” Conrad said. The command centre gave the order. The electricians threw the switches. And it worked. One station at a time, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, western Ottawa got its power back.
By Monday, just one substation in Manordale, one of the most storm-tossed parts of the city, was still dark. Hydro Ottawa was optimistic it would be juiced up by the end of the day.
A lot of work remains. The power grid is functioning, not fixed. The less electricity Ottawans use, the steadier it’ll be.
“The system is precarious. Every piece of our equipment is doing double duty,” Conrad said.
As the neighbourhood stations got power back, individual broken lines became new problems. In Trend-Arlington, one part of the city where local wires are underground, falling trees took out transformer boxes.
“As the power comes on, as the big pieces of power come on, we’re going to find lots of pockets of people who have wires down in their backyards. That’s natural, that’s what we expect,” Conrad said. “And frankly, given what we had a couple of days ago, that’s a good problem to have.”