It was a cold, snowy December morning with temperatures hovering around -20 C when Cheryl Turpin sat down to enjoy her coffee in her Orléans home. Then, shortly after 8 a.m. Tuesday, her power abruptly went out.
She later learned the outage was planned
by Hydro Ottawa
as part of underground maintenance work and would impact several households in her Convent Glen neighbourhood. But nobody knew it was coming.
“It was just radio silence,” Turpin said in an interview Wednesday.
She consulted the Hydro Ottawa service map, which stated the outage was expected to last around four hours. She made several trips to the garage to recharge her phone in her car as noon came and went, repeatedly refreshing the online outage map for any updates.
“After 12 o’clock when (the outage) kept going, they just took the time estimates off completely, and it just said, ‘We’re working on it,’ ” she said. “And I thought, ‘Well, this is going to be a long night.’ ”
After spending the day hunkered down under many blankets using a battery-powered headlamp to read a book, Turpin’s power came back on shortly after 7 p.m. Tuesday.
By that time, the temperature in her house had plummeted to 12 C. She missed her shift at work and chose to stay home with her two dogs, unsure how they’d fare in the frigid house if the outage continued. Plus, her car was stuck in the garage, which uses an electric system to open the door.
“Normally, if I’d known, I would have gone out and gotten prepared for all these kinds of things, but I wasn’t,” she said.
Hydro Ottawa cited a “communication lapse” as the reason why residents were left in the dark surrounding work taking place to support its Fortune renewal cable project, a multi-year initiative that will replace underground equipment that supplies power to Orléans residents.
“We have confirmed that a crucial breakdown occurred within our internal process, and key steps for community and official notification were missed,” a Hydro Ottawa spokesperson wrote in a statement.
“This is unacceptable. We are taking full responsibility for this oversight and have launched an immediate internal review with the teams involved to identify the exact cause and implement corrective measures.”
Hydro Ottawa also stated it would communicate future work to residents who may be impacted later this week.
It wasn’t rolled out in time for Wednesday’s set of outages, as Convent Glen resident Isabelle Macausland only found out her house would be impacted when she approached one of the contract workers on Tuesday night and asked if they could tell her anything.
“I just got lucky that I stopped the guy in the parking lot and asked him,” Macausland said. “So then I let some of my neighbours know, because that was the only warning we got.”
Sure enough, she said her power went out Wednesday morning at 8 a.m., just as the worker had told her it would. At 8:19 a.m., she said she received a text from Hydro Ottawa informing her the outage would be happening.
While she originally planned to work from home on Wednesday to avoid the snowstorm, she said she was grateful to have enough time to plan to go to the office instead and to make arrangements for her son to go to a friend’s house after school.
Orléans West-Innes Coun. Laura Dudas said on social media Tuesday night that she was also not informed about the upcoming outages and expressed frustration about the timing of the work during sub-zero temperatures.
“Words cannot begin to capture the sheer frustration and anger I feel at Hydro Ottawa’s reckless decision to impose a power outage in our community during such extreme freezing temperatures without a single notification to residents or myself. This was not just an inconvenience; it was a blatant disregard for the safety and wellbeing of families who depend on heat and electricity to get through the day,” she wrote on social media.
Hydro Ottawa did not directly address why power outages were scheduled for December, only citing that the ongoing project is a “multi-year, multi-phase initiative.”
Turpin and Macausland both said Convent Glen is home to many seniors and young children, and that power outages without warning could be a safety risk for people who rely on oxygen and medical monitors, for example. Turpin said she worries what will happen if her elderly mother loses power without warning at her house a few blocks away.
With construction ongoing in the neighbourhood for nearly six years now, Turpin added that, for many people, this unplanned power outage was the last straw.
“People are tired. This is the last thing we need right now between the LRT, the roundabout construction and now this (power outage),” she said. “I think that’s why people got even more bent out of shape, and I can understand that. It’s not a happy neighbourhood right now.”
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