WATCH: Toronto Hydro CEO Anthony Haines discusses the estimated costs and if there will be rate hikes as a result
TORONTO – Toronto Hydro officials estimated the cost of restoring power to nearly 300,000 customers following December’s ice storm at $12.9 million.
The number was revealed Thursday during a press briefing on restoration efforts from last month’s major weather event.
“75 per cent of the customers received power back in 48 hours,” said Toronto Hydro CEO Anthony Haines. “There was a great success with coordination efforts with other cities.”
READ MORE: Ice storm cost Toronto $106 million
The storm on Saturday Dec. 21 caused 500 wires to go down and 800 traffic lights to go out by Sunday morning.
Toronto Hydro received 374,000 calls during the first 10 days of the event, which amounts to about six months worth of volume.
“The call centre lit up for the first five or six days,” said Toronto Hydro Customer Care Vice-President Chris Tyrrell. “We normally received two to 3,000 calls a day.”
Hydro officials say they labelled the event a “level 3 emergency” which required employees to work around the clock.
The restoration effort rolled out in three phases with the first focusing on damage assessment, restoring critical loads and transformer stations.
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Phase two brought back main feeders, municipal stations and multi-residential areas – with phase three finally bringing back individual services that were lost.
“There’s was no incident of residents coming into contact with live wires,” said Toronto Hydro CEO Anthony Haines. “Our workers were able to execute their plans in a safe way.”
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Hydro said they had been tracking the weather system for days prior to the actual event but were not sure how severe the storm would be.
“We knew it was going to collide somewhere in Ontario, the question was when and the freeze line,” said Toronto Hydro Vice-President of Grid Operations Ben LaPianta. “Was it going to be snow, rain, sleet? We tracked it on Wednesday.”
Toronto Hydro also announced the creation of an independent review panel to analyze its response to December’s ice storm that caused hundreds of thousands of customers to lose power during the holidays.
Haines told reporters the panel will be chaired by energy veteran David McFadden, with Toronto City Manager Joe Pennachetti and Sean Conway from Ryerson University serving as members.
The panel will gather information and provide it to a private energy consulting firm, Davies Consulting, who will then release a final report later this year.
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