Feature Article December 18, 2003
LAND O' LAKES NewsWeb HomeHydro One faces frustrated AH residents
The Denbigh hall was packed on Monday night as a five-member delegation from Hydro One took some heat from Addington Highlands residents. The delegation came to an AH council meeting to explain why the northern part of Addington Highlands has experienced many hours of hydro outages - around 75 hours in the last month and a half, as well as power surges that have destroyed appliances. The audience clearly was, in the words of one woman, very frustrated; and lots of times weve been really, really cold!
Hydro One Superintendent Dave Robb gave a power point presentation with diagrams, maps and charts. He said that, contrary to rumours, there have been no planned outages since October 19; that the problems were basically caused by the weather, but that some of the outages had been caused by attempts by Hydro One to install a new generator in Griffith.
The generator was brought to Griffith with the intention of providing a reliable source of power and to relieve the strain on the other lines. Attempts were made on October 23 and 30 to get the generator to work, but those attempts failed, resulting in more outages.
Robb said the accusations which have been circulating that Hydro One does not have enough linemen and foresters, and had not done proper maintenance on the lines, were not true; that Hydro One has spent more money on maintaining the lines in the area than on any other lines.
He attempted to explain that the two recent storms had simply overwhelmed Hydro Ones resources, as thousands of homes in a widespread area had lost power. He vigorously defended the planning that went into the attempt to set up the generator, and Hydro Ones record of service to their customers in general.
After the presentation, the floor was open for questions from the audience. Bill Brown, who was instrumental in getting the delegation to the council meeting, asked why Hydro One had waited until the onset of winter to work on the generator. He was told by Dave Robb that Hydro Ones realization of the need to improve the system had just cropped up; they had not planned on it. Bill Brown also said that he had been waiting for two months to get some answers from Hydro One, and that the communication center might as well be in Australia!
Although Reeve Hook asked residents to limit themselves to one question, many could not pass up the opportunity to finally question Hydro One representatives face-to-face.
Extreme frustration over the inability to get answers from Hydro One was expressed by most of the audience, who felt that either Hydro One was making no attempts to keep the public informed of problems that would affect them, or any attempts were grossly inadequate. Many said that communication was the biggest problem. One man said that he had spent two days and made 12 phone calls trying to alert Hydro One to a large dead tree that posed a danger to the lines. When he finally did get through, he was told to forget about it. Dave Robb replied that such a response was not the norm; that linemen much preferred to remove a tree before it fell on lines.
Resident Gary Murphy asked if Hydro One would compensate residents for burnt-out appliances and satellite receivers, saying that he had lost a lot of food when his fridge was burnt out from power surges. He was told that claims would be investigated, but it did not sound that compensation was likely.
Residents also asked that Hydro One refund their service charges, as Bell Canada does when service is inadequate. They were told that compensation was not Hydro Ones policy.
The Hydro One delegation appeared to listen to residents concerns. Dave Robb mentioned several times that some of the difficulties had been caused by the Eves governments attempts to sell off parts of Hydro One. However, he gave no guarantees that there would not be more outages. Until you can control the weather, and until we can have 120 ft. right-of-ways, there will be problems, he said. He tried to end on an optimistic note, saying he felt that the doors of local Hydro One offices might be open again in a few years.
However, at the end of the meeting, residents were clearly not reassured that what they felt was Hydro Ones neglect of their situation would be rectified, and they left without any assurance that they would not face more hardships in the coming winter months.
Other council news: On what might be a similar note, Addington Highlands Council will attempt hold open public meetings with representatives from MPAC present to explain the increases in property assessments. Council will try to set up a meeting for each ward.
A request for funding for the Kaladar Santa Claus parade was turned down. Council felt that would not be a justifiable use of ratepayers dollars, and would force them to grant requests from other organizations. Reeve Hook said that no grants had been given to any organizations since amalgamation, and that would become the official policy of the township.
Fire Chief Casey Cuddy was questioned about the purchase of portable electric heaters. He reported difficulty getting reliable deliveries of propane from their supplier to heat the fire station. He said they ran out twice last winter, and had already run out once this winter. To avoid expensive damage to the trucks, the department bought the heaters, as the wired-in electric heaters were not working either.
