Power has been restored after a massive outage that affected the entire city of Pickering and parts of Ajax on Wednesday afternoon.
The outage, which began at around 1:30 p.m., resulted from a loss of power supply from Hydro One at the Cherrywood transformer station near Dixie Road in Pickering.
At its peak, the outage was impacting about 37,000 customers of local supplier Veridan Connections.
Crews were, however, able to begin restoring power shortly before 3 p.m. Power was then fully restored after about 10 minutes.
“They can’t just go and flick a switch and turn everyone back on but they are slowly, slowly turning that power supply back on.” Hydro One Spokesperson Tiziana Baccega Rosa told CP24 at the time.
Though the cause of the outage is not immediately clear, Baccega Rosa said that there was some sort of failure and that two transformers went offline as a precaution, as they are designed to do.
She said that crews will be investigating to determine what exactly went wrong.
"The priority was restoring the power to the customers but crews aren’t leaving anytime soon and they are going to keep investigating to determine what caused this power to come offline today," she said.
During the outage, the City of Pickering put all programs and activities on hold at the Don Beer Arena, the Pickering Recreation Complex, the Dunbarton High School pool and the East Shore Community Centre.
Meanwhile, the Durham Catholic District School Board said that while classes were not affected, the phone systems at some member schools were down.
