July 15, 2019 · 0 Comments
By Mike Baker
Orangeville Hydro has yet to pinpoint the cause of a local blackout that left 4,100 homes and businesses without power in the early hours of Monday morning (July 8).
The local utility confirmed on Tuesday that one of its four feeders on Orangeville’s electrical grid was out of service for approximately 74 minutes, from 1:25 a.m. to 2:39 a.m. on July 8. The outage affected thousands of properties in the area, with the bulk of the issues being seen in homes between Broadway and Townline on the community’s south side. Properties in the Purple Hill subdivision near Headwaters Health Care Centre were also affected.
Orangeville Hydro President Rob Koekkoek informed the Citizen the company was still working to identify what, exactly, sparked such a large-scale outage, but noted, due to the timing of it, there were few clues as to the cause.
“Right now we know the who, what, where and how,” Mr. Koekkoek said. “We’re working to identify the why.”
Mr. Koekkoek stated the problem originated with a breaker protecting one of the four main feeders that supplies power to properties in town. The breaker failed, creating a fault current. He noted Orangeville Hydro was currently working with Hydro One to identify what caused the fault current.
“Often we will find a raccoon, a bird or some other type of animal, or a branch by the site, or we’ll have citizens calling in saying they say a big flash,” Mr. Koekkoek said. “Because of the time of day, there haven’t been any witnesses come forward, so we’re still working to figure out what happened.”
He added, “This was a significant outage. I would say (the outage) was average in duration, but obviously on a larger scale” than is usually seen.
As of Wednesday morning, Mr. Koekkoek confirmed Orangeville Hydro was in “normal operation mode” and didn’t expect the issue to have any lingering effects on the community’s power grid.
“What we’ll be doing now is digging into the data within our equipment to try and find out what happened,” Mr. Koekkoek said.
For more information on Orangeville Hydro, and to check for any current outages and disruptions, visit orangevillehydro.ca.