Toronto Transformer Fire Causes Province-Wide Voltage Dip
Posted January 30, 2007 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Where were you when the lights went out?
If you’re like most of us, you were either in bed or just getting up for the day.
A fire at a hydro substation near the airport may have had crews out at the crack of dawn, but its effects were felt across much of the province and into the U.S. for the rest of the day.
It happened at 6:20am Tuesday, when something sparked a fire at the Richview Transformer Station near the 401 and Dixie.
Bulbs clicked off for a moment, subways slowed down and traffic lights began to flash as the power bump caught everyone off guard.
What happened? The cause of the fire isn’t clear, but its after effects were.
It appears the blaze caused a capacitor bank to fail at the station. They’re used to store electricity and the system is designed to automatically isolate the problem and switch to an alternate source.
That caused a drop in voltage, the resulting blip and the ripple effect across the province and as far away as Quebec.
Few full power outages were reported, but surges were noted in London, Hamilton, Peterborough, Niagara Falls, as well as in parts of northern Ontario and into the U.S.
Six fire trucks and 25 crewmen all responded immediately and so did police, who briefly had visions of terrorism dancing in their heads.
Fortunately, that didn’t turn out to be the case. “The cause of the fire is equipment failure, so that’s good news for everybody,” confirms Supt. Ron Taverner. “Obviously, from our perspective, we wanted to rule out any other possibilities here.”
Most homes were left relatively unaffected by the incident, but heavy power users – like businesses – experienced more extensive problems.
But as disruptive as things were, they worked pretty much the way they were supposed to.
“Their systems disconnected from the grid because of this slight voltage drop, and that was the impact that we saw in the system,” explains Hydro One spokesman Al Manchee. “Our system corrected itself very quickly, almost instantaneously.”
Unlike the great blackout of 2003, everything went according to plan. “You can visualize it as sort of a speed bump,” Manchee notes. “You’re going along and you hit a bump. You feel the vibration, but it passes in an instant.”
Questions were raised at Queen’s Park about the safety and reliability of the system, with critics worrying that a single station was capable of causing such a far reaching effect.
But Energy Minister Dwight Duncan begs to differ.
“We have the most reliable system in North America,” he argues. “I invite you to look at the report of the blackout commission. I invite you to see the award that Hydro One got left year. And these things do happen and it is the third or fourth time since I’ve been minister and the system worked well.”
“The system is extremely robust, it’s very safe … on very rare occasions like this we do see equipment failure,” Manchee agrees. “We’ll be conducting a thorough investigation to determine the cause of the fire.”
Electrical components sensitive to power bumps
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