Late last night, May 26, 2021, Oshawa Power customers experienced a widespread power outage that affected more than 12,000 customers, or approximately 20% of our customer base. The outage was a result of a power supply interruption to Hydro One’s Thornton Transformer Station which supplies Oshawa Power. Scheduled Hydro One maintenance, in combination with an equipment failure outside of Oshawa Power’s service territory, knocked out the primary power supply to our substations in the affected areas. Impacts of the event spread from areas east in Northumberland County, through the Durham Region, and west into the City of Pickering.
On call crews were activated and ready to begin the restoration process within 20 minutes of the event. Our team worked diligently to reroute power supply to the affected areas within our territory through our designated secondary supply at two other local Hydro One Transformer Stations. Ultimately, all Oshawa Power customers had their power restored within 54 minutes.
“Hydro One scheduled maintenance combined with an unforeseen equipment failure outside of Oshawa Power territory knocked out the supply to our substations. Crews were dispatched and did a great job “switching” or rerouting power through other stations and transformers to restore as many customers as possible until Hydro One was able to fix equipment and restore power supply to the affected areas within the Oshawa Power grid,” said Ivano Labricciosa, President and CEO of Oshawa Power. “Our Emergency Preparedness team acted quickly to get the word out to customers and crews quickly responded with a contingency plan to quickly restore power. We thank our customers for their understanding and patience as we worked to safely restore power to everyone,” continued Labricciosa.
Oshawa Power has detailed plans and procedures in place to respond swiftly to all emergency events, including last night’s situation. Our goal in these situations is to safely restore service to all affected customers as soon as we possibly can.
We appreciate your patience as we worked to restore power to our customers and are dedicated to understanding, and learning from, all outages, small and large, so that we can continue to provide the highest quality service at the lowest possible rates.
Oshawa Power would like to extend our gratitude to our crews who worked to have service restored swiftly and safely, the Durham Regional Police Services who activated to ensure local motorists could remain safe on our local roadways, and the local media, including Colin Williamson, for helping keep our customers informed and up-to-date as the situation unfolded late into the evening.
