Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Blackout hits downtown core

I'd like to point out that fear of a power outage has left me wearing practical shoes to work every day for the last several weeks and today was the first day I wore impractical ones and this is when we have an outage. It's not a huge deal because the TTC wasn't disrupted and I'm not too too far from home, but it is proof of Murphy's law.
Broken pole at substation the apparent cause
CURTIS RUSHSTAFF REPORTERA wide swath of the downtown core is without power at this hour because of a broken pole at a north Toronto transformer station. It's possible the pole was brought down by lightning as a storm moved through the city earlier.
A section of downtown bounded by Gerrard St. to the north, Lakeshore to the south, Bay St. to the west and the Don Valley Parkway to the east is affected.
The outages, which began shortly after 11 a.m., seem to be sporadic. Some locales have regained power while others remain in the dark.
Hydro spokesperson Tanya Bruckmueller said that source of the problem was traced to two transformer stations, one of which has been repaired, at the Esplanade.
The other, located in the George and Duke Sts. area, will be out for four to five hours. "It's a Hydro One repair that needs to be done. We're waiting for crews to collaborate to see what needs to be done," Bruckmueller said.
She said that problem can be traced to a broken pole, which may in turn be related to a violent storm that went through the area earlier.
"I can't tell you exactly how many customers are affected. Both substations feed the downtown grid, so when we got one substation repaired, it meant that some buildings have full power. Some have partial and some none at all," Bruckmueller said.
Bruckmueller said it's unlikely the problem was associated with power usage since demand doesn't normally peak until later in the day.
TTC spokeswoman Marilyn Bolton said there have been no reports of service disruption anywhere on the transit system.

No comments: