posted on January 23, 2009

Toronto Is blackout city

Why are the city’s power outages double those of London? 

By: LAWRENCE SOLOMON
Published: January 24, 2009
Source: Financial Post

Some 250,000 Torontonians lost their electricity last week, about half of them for 18 to 24 hours.  Had this power blackout happened in London or any other part of the U.K., each residential customer forced to endure such an extended hardship would have received £50 (about $92) in compensation. In the U.K., the public sees such compensation as simple justice — why shouldn’t the power company be held accountable?  This simple justice is unavailable to Torontonians who rely on city-owned Toronto Hydro, even though their hardship last week far exceeded anything the U.K. ordinarily experiences — the power loss also disabled home furnaces, no small matter with temperatures at -20 degrees centigrade.  Ninety-two dollars in compensation would have provided meaningful relief to many — the poor whose food spoiled with the loss of refrigeration, those forced to take taxis because the subway wasn’t running, those who lost a day of work because the power failure shut down their employer in Toronto’s downtown.

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/01/23/lawrence-solomon-toronto-is-blackout-city.aspx