Ivan Saric rarely takes a day off.
But it was while relaxing at home on Canada Day that the business owner noticed the temperatures of his walk-in freezers climb.
The app that helps Saric monitor temperature levels at his Stittsville meat and deli shop showed temperatures at -18 C. That usually sits at -28.
“It was suspicious,” Saric recalled.
Ottawa’s notorious Canada Day storm had wreaked havoc across the nation’s capital. And while the city’s west end, including Stittsville, was hit particularly hard, Saric was one of the last to experience the ripple effects of the city’s outages.
In the four days following July 1, Saric got up with the sun to head to his shop in hopes to meet with the Hydro Ottawa workers who had promised to help him.
Their first ETA was on Thursday at 4 a.m., he recalled.
“I was there at 3.”
The hydro workers weren’t.
Hydro Ottawa scheduled, then cancelled the appointment at least three times until around 9 p.m. on Saturday, when Saric got his lights back on.
“I just feel exhausted,” he said. “I’m happy now that it’s done, but I have a lot of issues to fix at the shop. It will be very challenging.”
‘It’s a lot of money’
Saric uses two electricity meters: One for his regular household electricity (which came back on with the rest of the city by Wednesday evening) and a three-phase heavy-duty one to help operate his large industrial meat grinders, meat saws and help cool the walk-in refrigerators.
“I’m the only one around here who used a three-phase,” he said.
The meat at the deli shop didn’t go bad, but the power outage came with a cost that Saric estimates will rise to up to $8,000.
To prevent the meat from spoiling, Saric had to rent out a generator to help power the refrigerators and freezers in his shop. He said his electrical company, Power Tech, rented him a mobile generator with 60,000 kilowatts.
“It uses $1,000 worth of diesel a day,“ he said. He estimates the generator alone will cost him thousands.
“It’s a lot of money,” he said. “We’re a small mom and pop shop,” he said.
Saric’s parents had first opened the Stittsville Meat Market in 1987 at the same 1496 Stittsville Main St. location. They ran the shop up until 2005 before renting out the property to other tenants for five years. Saric has been operating Ivan’s Meat and Deli ever since.
“This outage will set myself and my family back financially,” he said.
“I might be putting in an insurance claim but I’ll have to calculate the cost of damage with my broker to make sure it is worth putting in a claim, which will result in even higher insurance costs.”
MPPs and councillors want action
Saric says this four-day outage will hurt his business “terribly.”
“I just closed four days in the best time for the business when we make money now for our slow days in January and February.”
Five Ottawa MPPs and four city councillors signed an open letter calling on Ontario to “immediately delay” financial assistance for those affected by the Canada Day notorious flooding.
Barrhaven East Coun. Wilson Lo, Barrhaven West Coun. David Hill, Knoxdale-Merrivale Coun. Sean Devine and College Coun. Laine Johnson signed the July 3 letter. The MPPs who signed were Nepean’s Tyler Watt, Ottawa-Vanier’s Lucille Collard, Kanata-Carleton’s Karen McCrimmon, Orléans MPP Stephen Blais and Ottawa South’s MPP John Fraser.
The letter urged the provincial government to deploy funds assisting Ottawa residents in their recovery from the July 1 flood and subsequent power outages.
“At its peak, about 40,000 residents were without power, with thousands still experiencing outages, as recovery efforts continue,” read the letter.
The MPPs and councillors argued that Ottawa residents should not bear the burden “of a disaster of this magnitude on their own.”
“We respectfully ask the Province to immediately deploy the Provincial Disaster Assessment Team to Ottawa, and should the eligibility criteria be met, activate the Disaster Recovery Assistance for Ontarians program for affected areas,” according to the letter.
In a social media post late Friday, Devine said he had met with a number of Ottawa flooding survivors who either had “insufficient insurance coverage for their damage, or whose insurance policies don’t cover this kind of damage at all.”
As a result, some households will have to pay the cost of the damages out of pocket.
“No household should be expected to bear that burden,” he wrote.
West End hit hardest
Three days after the storm, Saric was among “approximately 629 customers without power across 71 individual outages city-wide,” according to Hydro Ottawa spokesperson Josée Larocque.
The numbers continued to dwindle as Hydro Ottawa made its rounds across the city this weekend.
Ottawa’s West End experienced the heaviest concentrated rainfall and localized flooding,
In an email, Larocque said specific areas where crews are still managing active power outages include the Bay, College and Kitchissippi wards. Larocque said other wards have been greatly impacted, including Knoxdale-Merivale.
“The majority of these are small, localized incidents impacting fewer than 10 customers each,” Larocque wrote. “Once we address the single outages, crews will be dispatched across the city to restore power at those locations.”
Though the Hydro Ottawa power outage map showed Saric’s location in Stittsville as “fewer than 10 customers,” he said he was the only one that he knew who still didn’t have power.
Hydro Ottawa provided an explanation for the delays.
The flood’s localization in the west end caused water to pool around Hydro Ottawa’s infrastructure, Larocque said in the email and that the flooding restricted the organization’s ability to safely access some locations.
“Because water and electricity do not mix, the safety of the public and our crews remains our top priority,” Larocque said.
Larocque said crews are working “as quickly and safely as possible” to restore power.
Hydro Ottawa said it aimed to reduce the remaining outages by the weekend, adding that they have secured additional contractors over the weekend to assist with individual repairs.
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