Strong winds knocked down trees and power lines on Monday, leaving thousands of county hydro customers without electricity for much of the night – and some in the dark well into Tuesday evening.
The winds, with gusts approaching 100km/h in some areas, caused over 800 power outages in southern Ontario on Monday night, affecting 87,000 Hydro One customers.
On Tuesday morning Hydro One officials stated all available crews – including those from areas not affected by the storm – were working to restore power to more than 57,000 customers still without power. By 6pm that number was down to 20,000.
“This violent wind storm has caused widespread damage right across southern Ontario,” Greg Towns, director of provincial lines for Hydro One, said in a press release.
“More than 1,200 employees from our lines and forestry crews are out in full force and we appreciate our customers’ patience.”
Hydro One also had five helicopters working to assess damage and move equipment, the release stated.
Rural areas in Centre Wellington, Guelph-Eramosa and Puslinch were to have power restored by late Tuesday night, while those in the Erin area were expected to have power back by around 6pm.
Fergus
Much of the town of Fergus, which is supplied through Centre Wellington Hydro, was in the dark on Nov. 24.
Company officials confirmed a downed tree on Anderson Street was the source of the local outage, which affected about 4,000 customers.
In Fergus, power went off at about 7pm and was restored at around 9pm.
“It could have been a lot worse, especially with that wind,” Centre Wellington Hydro vice president/operations manager Wayne Dyce
said in an interview on Tuesday morning.
Environment Canada issued a wind warning for the Wellington County area on Monday afternoon.
The storm, Dyce said, “was blowing stuff around pretty good.”
He explained power in Fergus went out “due to a large tree that had fallen across power lines on Anderson Street.”
He said the tree was the cause of the outage on the original feeder line which services Fergus and also one of Hydro One’s feeder lines which directs power to Arthur.
“Once that tree was cleared, Fergus customers were quite happily restored,” said Dyce, adding in some areas the high winds “caused the wires to gallop.”
Dyce said there was a full crew working in Fergus that night and Hydro One crews were out working as well.
He noted Centre Wellington Hydro posts outages and other issues on it website at http://www.cwhydro.ca, which includes a link to a service area issue reporting map.
Arthur
While power was restored in Fergus within a couple of hours, much of the village of Arthur was without power for over four hours on Monday night – roughly from 7:30pm until midnight.
“The incoming power lines that feed Arthur were struck by trees,” Jim Klujber told the Advertiser.
Manager of operations with Wellington North Power, Klujber explained “several trees” downed by the storm left about 1,000 Arthur customers in the dark.
