May 9, 2009 West Toronto Power Outage

From: Councillor Gord Perks, to a general list

Good afternoon,

I apologize for the delay in my response. I have been in touch with Hydro staff and they confirmed that the power was indeed out for about 2 hours starting at approximately 12:15 am on Saturday May 9, 2009.

The area affected spread out from the Dufferin Station north to St. Clair Ave. W., south to Queen St, west to Parkside Dr. and east to Howland Ave., plus from Vine St. to Queen St., from Quebec Ave. to Ossington Ave.

The cause was a foreign object coming into contact with the equipment at the Hydro One station adjacent to Toronto Hydro's Dufferin Station.

Further, I have requested that staff from Hydro advise on how the process for getting information out to affected residents is going.

From: celos information, May 26 2009

To: Karen Evans, media relations, Toronto Hydro

Hello Karen,

Following up on our phone call, these are my questions:

1. what actually happened to cause the May 9 power outage (described in Councillor Perks' e-mail below)?
2. can you give me the link on the http://torontohydro.ca website where this is described?
3. half an hour after the May 9th outage began, Toronto Hydro's phone line had a message giving the boundaries of the outage, and saying that it was a Hydro One matter but that Toronto Hydro had been unable to get information about either the cause of the possible length of the outage. That message did not change during the outage, as far as I know.
4. The Hydro One staff that night said it was not a Hydro One cause but a Toronto Hydro cause -- which is true?
5. After a number of attempts to get the information for posting on our (blackout pages), I resolved to go through freedom of information. However I can find no link on the torontohydro.ca site for FOI, and when I called Toronto Hydro, they referred me to public relations for the right number. I left a message but got no call back. Could you please send me the link for the Toronto Hydro F.O.I. forms?
6. If in fact a large part of the west end was without power because of a raccoon (rumour), what has now been done to prevent other animals etc. from getting into the Dufferin substation?
7. What plans does Toronto Hydro have for carrying out its better-communication assurances during power outages? (made at the public meetings following the January power outage). Timing?

Thanks in advance --

Jutta Mason
http://celos.ca

From Karen Evans, May 26 2009

Hello Ms Mason I have received your note. I will be out at a Toronto Hydro event all day tomorrow but I have asked a member of my team to begin research to find answers to your questions. I hope to have some answers by Friday or Monday.

From City Councillor Gord Perks (he is on the Toronto Hydro board), to a list, May 29 2009:

I am writing to confirm that Toronto Hydro has advised that they are continuing to work to improve how they communicate to customers during planned and unexpected outages in the future.

During business hours, Hydro will have the ability (during the day) to stop all other customer care inquiries when call volumes increase due to an outage. Hydro advised that since this event happened in the early hours of the weekend, the calls started coming in around midnight when Hydro had a reduced night shift available to receive calls. They confirmed that approximately 340 customers heard a "high volume" message between 12:00 - 1:00 a.m. and that most of these callers would have heard the "outage" message first.

They advised that an outage message was recorded shortly after midnight, once the outage boundaries were confirmed. All other calls were handled by the dispatcher and customer call in line if the customer chose to input their outage information. Updates to the initial message were recorded at approximately 1:30, 2:00 and then at 2:30 a.m.

After the large outage in January, Hydro did increase their capacity to process 30 per cent more calls in a high-volume call-in situation, and are currently reviewing ways to improve their customer call in line and response time.

Finally they report current power outages on Toronto Hydro's website, www.torontohydro.com, when an outage is intended to last several hours, affects several thousand customers and affects densely populated areas of the City and/or affects other essential services (i.e. public transit, etc). Toronto Hydro, on a case-by-case basis, creates a feature on the main home page with updates as they become available from the control room.

Going forward, Toronto Hydro is currently building an online outage management system (OMS) which will present, in real time, most across the City of Toronto. The outage boundaries displayed will be presented via a colour coded system. The OMS will display, in most cases, the nature of the outage, the number of customers affected, and the estimated time of restore. Special notes will be included where necessary. Toronto Hydro currently projects that the new OMS system will be live in late-summer / early fall 2009. Future enhancements will include mobile text and email outage alerts as well as postal code outage search.

They will keep me posted as they move forward.