I was brought up in Nova Scotia but spent 20 years in Toronto so I agree with your assessment of Hydro One’s performance. You should do an assessment for Nova Scotia Power especially in rural areas. You would find out we lag behind Cameroon by a wide margin.
I moved to central Halifax in 2013, having previously lived in the suburbs. There, I bought a generator after going without power for several days following Hurricane Juan in 2003, a classic example of shutting the door after the horse has run away. I used that generator twice in the ten years before I moved. Here in downtown Halifax, I get twice yearly power failures, generally lasting hours to days, causing a lot of food wastage in the summer, with a risk of everything freezing up in the winter. I ended up buying a generator and having a switch installed on the meter, so I can power the whole house. My two immediate neighbours have done likewise. Interestingly, the buildings a couple of doors down are on a different part of the grid, and almost never lose power. Almost every outage is blamed on the weather, although I’m pretty sure those guys on the next block get the same weather we do.
Our numbers are reported provincially, at 1.57 outages per customer, averaging 4.79 hours. They don’t reflect my reality. I would love to have your numbers, or even the numbers I used to have in the suburbs.
There's probably potential for a great research paper exploring how municipal choices play out decades later.
And these things can definitely be hyper-local. I remember feeling guilty during Ottawa's ice storm (1999?) when I never lost power while most of my closest neighbors went days without.
Thanks for the stats!
Here in suburban Ottawa we once had a hydro pole repaired at night in the teeth of the storm. Amazing work required to achieve those metrics.
I do wish people would keep their trees away from hydro wires. Most outages here are due to homeowner negligence.
I was brought up in Nova Scotia but spent 20 years in Toronto so I agree with your assessment of Hydro One’s performance. You should do an assessment for Nova Scotia Power especially in rural areas. You would find out we lag behind Cameroon by a wide margin.
I moved to central Halifax in 2013, having previously lived in the suburbs. There, I bought a generator after going without power for several days following Hurricane Juan in 2003, a classic example of shutting the door after the horse has run away. I used that generator twice in the ten years before I moved. Here in downtown Halifax, I get twice yearly power failures, generally lasting hours to days, causing a lot of food wastage in the summer, with a risk of everything freezing up in the winter. I ended up buying a generator and having a switch installed on the meter, so I can power the whole house. My two immediate neighbours have done likewise. Interestingly, the buildings a couple of doors down are on a different part of the grid, and almost never lose power. Almost every outage is blamed on the weather, although I’m pretty sure those guys on the next block get the same weather we do.
Our numbers are reported provincially, at 1.57 outages per customer, averaging 4.79 hours. They don’t reflect my reality. I would love to have your numbers, or even the numbers I used to have in the suburbs.
There's probably potential for a great research paper exploring how municipal choices play out decades later.
And these things can definitely be hyper-local. I remember feeling guilty during Ottawa's ice storm (1999?) when I never lost power while most of my closest neighbors went days without.
And how long did it take to clear that fallen tree from the road?
Actually, that one's still there. I just walked past it a couple of minutes ago.
Yikes!