Fewer than 300 Toronto Hydro customers remained without power Monday night, nine days after an ice storm struck and plunged hundreds of thousands of people into darkness.
According to Toronto Hydro CEO Anthony Haines, the affected customers are mostly located in the Scarborough area, where the location of distribution systems has made repairing downed lines more difficult.
“The distribution system is in their backyards which makes it very difficult for our crews to restore those lines,” Haines told CP24 Monday afternoon. “It is not just the case of a big truck working up in the tress and clearing and rehanging the wires. In these cases we actually have to carry the materials back there, put those old spikes on and make the necessary repairs. It is very labour intensive and very slow going.”
Haines did not say how long it would take to restore power to the remaining 290 customers, but Mayor Rob Ford did tell reporters earlier in the day that he expected everyone to have their power back by the end of the night.
As Ford and other city officials gathered at a news conference, the mayor said the ice storm had an unprecedented impact on Toronto.
“We have never had a storm like this in Toronto’s history and hopefully we will never have to do this again,” Ford told reporters.
The mayor said the city is closing two more warming centres - at Dennis R. Timbrell and Pleasantview community centres - after 72 people spent the night at warming centres Sunday night.
Now that the power is almost fully restored and things are almost back to normal, the city is turning its attention to reviewing its response to the ice storm and debating whether to ask the province for disaster relief funding.
The mayor called a special council meeting for Jan. 10 to consider a formal request for provincial assistance under the Ontario Disaster Relief Assistance Program.
Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne announced Monday that a handful of retailers - Shoppers Drug Mart, Metro, Sobeys and Coppas Fresh Market - are donating thousands of dollars' worth of gift cards to people whose food spoiled during a prolonged power outage.
Loblaw previously announced its own donation and the province is matching contributions to a maximum of $100,000. So far, the corporate donations total more than $100,000. The Daily Bread Food Bank will oversee the distribution of the gift cards.
Toronto residents who experienced a prolonged power outage and need help can collect a gift card at one of 15 Ontario Works Toronto offices from Tuesday to Friday. The offices are closed New Year's Day (Wednesday).
Families are eligible to receive a $100 gift card, while individuals are eligible for a $50 gift card. People are asked to bring confirmation of their address and they will be asked to declare the number of people in their household, the province says.
City thanks workers, residents
After holding daily or twice daily briefings since Dec. 22, Ford and several department heads held their final briefing Monday morning and they spent a lot of time thanking city employees who worked long hours and missed family gatherings over the holiday season, residents for their resilience and patience, and each other for their work to co-ordinate the relief effort.
Haines became emotional when he thanked his staff who worked around the clock.
“We’re all tired but we never stopped,” Haines said.
TCHC CEO Eugene Jones said he was involved in the San Francisco earthquake relief effort in 1989 and the Hurricane Katrina relief effort in New Orleans in 2005, and he believes the co-ordination of Toronto’s ice storm response was smoother than those of the two larger disasters, which caused widespread devastation and many deaths, and left thousands of people homeless.
“I’ve been through both of them and I can tell you that the team behind me and how they came together and the co-ordination, the communication and so forth is far better than anything I’ve experienced in San Francisco and New Orleans,” Jones said.
Reconnecting the last remaining Toronto Hydro customers is a slow and difficult process because some buildings sustained structural damage that needs to be repaired and some wires and poles are located in inconvenient places.
In many cases, detached hydro wires are located behind a house or building and they are inaccessible to Toronto Hydro's bucket trucks, said Toronto Hydro spokeswoman Tanya Bruckmueller.
That means employees must put on their spikes and climb hydro poles "the old-fashioned way," adding more time to the restoration effort, Haines said.
It took six hours to restore electricity to one home, Haines said.
The utility has contacted the Electrical Safety Authority to help with inspections once homeowners repair structural damage inflicted by the crippling ice storm. As of Monday morning, there were about 680 locations that have received ESA approval to reenergize following repairs to electrical stand pipes.
Bruckmueller said the cold weather isn’t affecting hydro equipment but it is definitely having an impact on employees who are working outside for extended periods. Overnight, the temperature dropped to -11 C with a wind chill of -19. The daytime high will be just -9 C.
Outside help was brought in to speed up the restoration effort and Haines is hoping the nearly 40 Manitoba Hydro workers who volunteered can return home later Monday.
Toronto residents who are still without power are asked to call Toronto Hydro at 416-542-8000 to make sure the utility is aware of the outage and to troubleshoot the reason for the outage, be it an issue on Toronto Hydro's end or a problem with equipment within the home.
Outside Toronto, hydro crews are working to restore electricity for hundreds of customers. Hydro One and PowerStream were both reporting outages affecting less than 1,000 customers.
All Toronto District School Board child care sites are open Monday except for Broadlands, Fairmount and Hillmount. Those three locations are still closed due to "ice storm issues."
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