Hundreds of CTrain riders in Calgary were left out in the cold Friday morning after a power outage stopped the trains in the downtown core while temperatures plummeted.
The outage began at 7:44 a.m. Calgary Transit said an estimated 15 shuttle buses were dispatched to provide relief services to stations as Seventh Avenue was shut down for three hours. The agency it assumes the -36 C temperature played a role in the outage.
Calgary Transit spokeswoman Jenn Boyer said the outage took everyone by surprise.
“We are not quite sure what caused it as of yet. We are going to be investigating that later. For now our priority is to get our customers where they need to go. Keeping them safe and warm, and keeping our operators safe as well.”
At the Bridgeland station, there were about 200 would-be riders lined up, battling the cold, and hoping the buses would hurry up.
CTransit rider Ali Khan said he feels Calgary Transit could do better. “You have been here an hour? Yes, there are so many people inside there. (The) train is coming. Look, this is the third train and no buses here.”
Boyer said Calgary Transit worked as fast as possible knowing the dangers in extreme cold.
“It might take some time for us to respond to these incidents. But we do our best to get our shuttles down as quickly as we can.
“We provide shuttle service to get people to where they need to go. At CTrain stations, we had warming trains available for people to sit in while they waited for their shuttles to arrive.”
Boyer said most service was back up by 10:45 a.m. But transit and Enmax workers were still inspecting the tunnel on the south line under the public library. One track was in service and one was not.