Hydro One experienced an outage on its transmission system that resulted in a loss of supply to Hydro One customers along with customers of Lakeland Power and Elexicon Energy on January 29.
The outage started at 8:37 a.m. on Saturday and at the peak, affected over 6,000 Hydro One customers. The Town of Bracebridge opened a warming centre Saturday night at the town office for those who needed to seek shelter. The outage was caused by a transformer switch at Hydro One’s Bracebridge Transmission Station that failed. In addition, a broken cross arm and a broken pole affected two key distribution lines.
Hydro One said these lines serve the area’s distribution stations resulting in a wide spread outage in Bracebridge and Gravenhurst.
Crews worked as quickly and as safely as possible through the extreme cold to create a by-pass at the Bracebridge Transmission Station in order to reroute power to customers and make the required repairs on the distribution lines.
The majority of customers were restored by midnight; however, about 400 Hydro One customers remained without power until 10 p.m. Sunday while crews used a helicopter and snowmobiles to repair the cross arm and the pole that were located in a hard to reach, off-road location.
“We understand that any loss of power can be difficult, especially during the winter months and we appreciate our customers’ patience while our crews and operators worked to restore power,” said Tiziana Baccega Rosa, Sr. Media Relations Advisor at Hydro One.