The South Bayview Bulldog

The twinkling porch lights tell it all. Throughout Moore Park, Bennington Heights and along Leaside’s signature drive named Bessborough, furnaces are on and families can do some short-term planning for Christmas morning. Most people have had elaborate plans washed out by the ice storm and its nasty aftermath. A Lawrence Park woman who took temporary refuge at the Roehampton Best Western spoke with sadness about a family reunion at her cottage which will not happen. Modern homes still have endless tasks left to clean up. Cars smashed by branches, the actual edibility of food in the fridge, restoring all the electronic utilities to more or less normal. But for the uniquely blessed residents of this part of Canada, an important corner has been turned. There are still pockets of darkness in South Bayview and our minds can never be at rest as long as vast numbers of Torontonians in the west end and Scarborough continue to labour under freezing conditions. Hope is real however as Hydro reports the diminishing number of those without power — down to 115,000 metered households or businesses — and that dozens of skilled crews from as far away at Manitoba are trucking to Toronto right now to help out. Some are already at work.

The lights are back on along South Bayview. Stores and shops are open Monday and there was a good number of people on the street by noon. Tzatz, the women’s wear store has a hastily made sign in the window saying WE ARE OPEN.  Toronto Hydro said that Sunnybrook Hospital would have primary power restored by today. The key health sciences centre has been operating on back up generators since early Sunday. But thousands of South Bayview homes face a dark and cold pre-Christmas. Inset, one lucky homeowner can bundle the family around a gas fireplace. On the Run at Mt Pleasant and Merton Street was definitely idle and bottom inset, a branch weighs heavily on a power line into a home in Moore Park. It may yet cause an outage. On Mt Pleasant Rd. things are still a bit rocky although stores are open even if they don’t have power. Traffic is confused because of traffic light outages all up the street to Mt Pleasant and Manor Rd. Traffic signals are back in operation at Bayview and Millwood and Bayview and Manor Rd. At a news conference this morning Anthony Haines, CEO of Toronto Hydro, revised the estimate of customers still without power to about 215,000. This he said represented “metres” not individuals. Generally, a metre might be considered a household or business. Mr. Haines said that critical services such as Sunnybrook and East General Hospital, and the two Toronto pumping stations, have been re-connected to the Hydro grid. He also noted that the next priority for Hydro is the so-called “big feeders” which had failed. They are sources of electrical power to neighborhoods. The repair of one feeder would immediately bring many households back on line. Mr Haines said the last priority are the unfortunate people who have lost power to single houses, or to just a few, in a neighborhood where there is still power. This has typically been caused by a branch bringing down a line into a home, leaving the service next door untouched. In some cases it may take until the end of the week to see all these single cases fixed.

Fallen trees and branches litter the streets of mid-town Toronto this Sunday (December 22, 2013) as more than a quarter of a million people in Canada’s largest municipality are without power. Toronto Hydro has estimated 250,000 in the dark but later in the day raised that number to 300,000. Across the Greater Toronto Area, it appears as many as half a million may be without power. Because of the still uncounted number of lines down in Toronto it is likely that many will face Christmas Eve, or maybe even Christmas morning, without lights and power..Hydro emergency sources were telling residents to expect service for snapped wires laying across vehicles to be looked after “in two or three days.” It is, as Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong put it, the worst storm the city has see in recent times. Hydro CEO Anthony Haines called the ice storm “catastrophic.” Mayor Ford held a news conference in the early afternoon in which he said that two hospitals, Sunnybrook and East General, are without power. This disconcerting news was clarified by Premier Wynne in her news conference in which she noted that the two hospitals are operating on back up generated power. She thanked those who still had electricity in their homes for welcoming neighbors who were caught in the blackout into their homes. The outages have occurred in patches of sometimes curious pattern through the mid-town corridor of the city. One aspect of this is the number of mature trees in that part of the city. Sometimes an outage involved only one home. Elsewhere, as in large parts of South Bayview, the outage is quite general.  Toronto Hydro said it may be up to 72 hours before power is fully restored. In Ottawa, Prime Minister Harper said his thoughts are with with those who are without power. Photo via Twitter of Toronto after a long dark night of falling trees.