FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 23, 2013
NOTL HYDRO CREWS BATTLE OUTAGES DUE TO THUNDERSTORMS
Niagara-on-the-Lake – After a long weekend of emergency repairs and fixes, Ontario is still mending the damage from the thunderstorms that knocked out power to many areas of the province. NOTL Hydro crews worked around the clock starting on Friday afternoon, before the storm hit the area.
Friday afternoon, a tree limb fell on a line on Lakeshore road, knocking out power to the Garrison Village area and was quickly repaired. When this was corrected, and power restored, the storm hit. Environment Canada called it “the biggest severe weather outbreak of the season” as our recent hot and humid weather met a cold front to set the stage for severe thunderstorms across Central and Southern Ontario.
“It lasted all night, and got to the point where it was too dangerous to even go up in the bucket (truck); once the situation was deemed safe to continue, we quickly got right back to work”, said NOTL Hydro Line Supervisor Craig McLean. Due to the amount of work at hand we required more resources and had called in neighbouring utilities to our aid. We’d like to thank Welland Hydro for sending a crew to help with the repairs and assisting the restoration of power to our community as quickly as possible.
Hampering the efforts further, communications to a control centre in Waterloo were lost due to a lightning strike. The Waterloo control centre is normally used to activate some switches remotely which required many power activations to be completed manually.
All residential customers had their power restored by the end of day on Saturday as crews were able to repair transformers and isolate issues plaguing much of the Olde Town. Crews were back to work Sunday morning at 7am to restore the few businesses that could not be completed the previous day. In total, 9 transformers needed to be replaced, many trees had to be safely removed from power lines, switches repaired manually and close to 50 line fuses had to be replaced. The largest transformer affected White Oaks Conference Centre and Resort, which was struck by lighting. A new transformer was ready and installed early Saturday morning.
“We are extremely proud of our team from our linemen for working around the clock in severe weather, to our dedicated customer service staff who came in to assist the multitude of customers calling in for status updates.” said Hassan Syed, Operations Manager. “We are also grateful to our customers for their patience and understanding while we worked to restore power in NOTL.”
ABOUT NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE HYDRO
Niagara-on-the-Lake Hydro distributes power to 8000 customers in the municipality of Niagara-on-the-Lake. We are committed to operating as a sustainable high performance, customer-driven business. NOTL Hydro delivers value-added, energy-related services and products while assessing green energy opportunities. We are also proud of our commitment to providing the highest standard safety, service and reliability.
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