Oshawa Power planning solutions to future major weather events

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Published May 27, 2022 at 10:02 am

Photo by Robert Bell

As Oshawa Power crews are wrapping up restoration efforts and travelling to neighbouring communities to help bring power back to families across Durham and the rest of the province, senior officials at the utility are assessing damages to the grid and planning solutions against future major weather events.

“We understand that as our climate changes and weather events increase in frequency, resiliency (strength of our system) and redundancy (backup systems) are keys to keeping the lights on across Oshawa and minimizing restoration times during outage events,” Oshawa Power CEO Ivan Labricciosa said in a statement. “With a strong emergency response plan and incredible crews who without hesitation worked around the clock, we were able to restore power quickly to Oshawa.”

Oshawa Power gave thanks to its crew members and to the emergency service and municipal workers who “helped keep Oshawa safe” during the storm.

“Last but not least, we thank you, our customers, for your patience and encouragement as we dealt with numerous outages across the city.”

 

9,000+

On Saturday afternoon, a little more than 9,000 Oshawa Power customers lost power to their homes or places of business — the most in a single outage event since December 2013’s ice storm. Within minutes, the Oshawa Power team began to assemble to plan for restoration efforts.


99%

Number of Oshawa Power customers who had power restored to their homes by Sunday evening.


85+ km/h

Wind speeds during the storm reached upwards of 85 km/h as recorded at the Oshawa Executive Airport. The resiliency of the infrastructure put in place over careful planning of the last ten to twenty years lessened the impact and supported our restoration efforts.


8.1 kilometers

Length of overhead wires were replaced in the aftermath of the storm or approximately enough to stretch from Oshawa’s eastern border with Courtice to its western border with Whitby.


25 poles

Crews replaced 25 broken poles over the weekend.


Thousands of additional materials

… including insulator, sleeve, transformer, switch, arrestor, etc. repairs and replacements, our team used thousands of additional parts and materials in our restoration effort. Through careful inventory planning, Oshawa Power was prepared with all required materials.

For more information on how Oshawa Power is preparing the grid for the future and working to minimize outages, visit Capital Rebuild Plan and Tree Trimming web pages.

 

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