BLACKOUT LEAVES THOUSANDS IN THE DARK
Pedestrians and vehicles are seen Wednesday night at the Market Hall Clock Tower on George St. in downtown Peterborough after a widespread power outage. A Hydro One transmission line outage left thousands of Peterborough Utilities and Hydro One customers without power.
A widespread power outage occurred around 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday in the city, reaching through areas of Peterborough County as far as Norwood, Lakefield and Curve Lake First Nation.
Although some areas of the city had power — such as parts of East City — the downtown and much of the city were plunged into darkness.
Hydro One had issues with an 82-megawatt transmission line and estimated it could take all night before power was fully restored.
About 60 per cent of Peterborough Utilities customers in Peterborough, Lakefield and Norwood were affected.
As of 9:30 p.m., power had been restored to half of them, but restoration to the rest, 7,400 mainly in the south end of the city served by the Otonabee transformer station along with 1,500 in Lakefield and 800 in Norwood, depended on Hydro One repairs that could take until midnight.
About 23,286 customers of Hydro One in the Peterborough area were also affected at the height of the outage.
By around 9:45 p.m., power had been restored to most of the Hydro One customers.
As a result, Peterborough Utilities urged its customers to curb their power usage for the night to avoid triggering more outages.
City firefighters responded to several calls Wednesday evening where people were trapped in elevators due to the power outage.
There were also some vehicle collisions in the city as the traffic lights went dark; one crash occurred soon after the power outage at the intersection of Monaghan Rd. and Lansdowne St.
City police urged motorists to treat affected intersections as four-way stops.
Some planned events were cancelled on Wednesday evening due to the power outage.
A panel discussion about wild rice in Pigeon Lake — featuring playwright Drew Hayden Taylor, who’s written the play Cottagers and Indians — had to be cancelled at Market Hall even though the audience had already arrived.
The nearly full house was evacuated, and the event is expected to be rescheduled (although details weren’t immediately available).
The Balsillie Family YMCA on Aylmer St. closed early too due to the power outage.
YourTV had to cancel its live interview with Otonabee Ward councillor-elect Kim Zippel when the power went out midway through the Politically Speaking one-hour show. YourTV plans to reschedule the interview.
Peterborough Police asked people not to jam their line with inquiries about the power outage; those calls were director to Peterborough Utilities.