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“A year of work in six or seven days,” is how Hydro Ottawa’s Bryce Conrad described the effort to reconnect nearly 180,000 customers.
Cleaning continues at Hammond Golf and Country Club after a recent storm cut several hundred mature trees off the course. Photo of ERROL MCGIHON / POSTMEDIA
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A sharp heart of chainsaws replaced the crack of golf balls this week at Hammond Golf and Country Club, where last Saturday’s storm devastated 300 mature pines.
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Volunteers worked all week to cut down and cut down the fallen trees, pick up and burn the felled mountains. Two huge bonfires sent clouds of pine-scented smoke over the region, few of which were left untouched by the right-wing storm that suddenly moved and in 20 minutes inflicted lasting scars on the landscape and left 180,000 homes and businesses without. power.
Most of Hydro Ottawa’s electrical system was expected to be restored on Friday evening.
But in the worst-hit areas, such as Cumberland, Stittsville, Knoxdale and Merivale, the cleanup will continue for weeks. The cost of this cleanup is expected to amount to millions of dollars.
Rebuilding what the storm destroyed could take years and millions more. Houses and porches have been cracked, bent and broken by falling trees. In rural eastern Ottawa, farmers have lost barns, sheds and garages.
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In Sarsfield, the church bell tower and bell tower crashed to the ground in the wind. Near Highway 417 and Hunt Club Road, four Hydro One steel transmission towers collapsed.
Four people in the region died under the hail of fallen trees and branches from the storm, while another drowned in the Ottawa River after their pontoon boat capsized.
“I don’t think people appreciate the magnitude of this event,” Hydro Ottawa CEO Bryce Conrad said in an interview Friday.
Bryce Conrad is President and CEO of Hydro Ottawa. Photo by Jean Levac / Postmedia
Conrad said the storm adversely affected all parts of Hydro Ottawa’s 1,100-square-mile coverage area and was many times more damaging than the 1998 ice storm and 2018 tornadoes, which caused damage. more localized.
“This storm didn’t look like anything we’d ever seen or dealt with before,” he said. “It looked like a weather bomb had taken our electrical system out.”
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The storm ravaged the region on a wide front, removing 325 power supplies. The ice storm knocked down 50 poles and tornadoes that hit Dunrobin and parts of Nepean claimed 80.
Hydro Ottawa typically replaces about 340 utility poles for an entire year.
“We’re actually doing a year of work in six or seven days,” Conrad said.
The damage to the electrical system was so severe that half of Hydro Ottawa’s 360,000 customers were disconnected from the grid. It meant that the electrical infrastructure that supported these customers was lying on the ground or damaged by trees and wind.
“We had to rebuild half of our system to get people and the network back,” said Conrad, who was in Calgary at his mother-in-law’s funeral when the storm struck. He has rarely left his office since returning on Sunday.
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As damage assessments arrived after the storm, hydraulic officials began gathering the resources (sticks, trucks, and personnel) needed to deal with the unprecedented situation. Public service contractors and crews in Ontario, Quebec and the Northeastern United States were called in to help.
Hydraulic engineers have pioneered new routes for electricity to help some neighborhoods reactivate. Apart from Bayshore, for example, electricity is now being sent from Kanata instead of the Merivale substation, Conrad said. A similar situation exists in some parts of Barrhaven.
Conrad said the system should be completely rebuilt in a week, but inspection teams will have to assess other parts of the network to detect damage that is not yet evident.
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There is no doubt that Hydro Ottawa has to tighten its infrastructure, Conrad said, given the damage caused by last week’s tornadoes, floods and storms.
The company has already made improvements to its generating stations, Conrad said, and will examine its north-south transmission lines, Woodroffe Avenue, Merivale Road, Greenbank Road, Hawthorne Road, to see how they can be strengthened.
But it would be prohibitive, he warned, to build a system capable of withstanding the winds of 190 kilometers per hour that hit land in some places during Saturday’s storm.
The power of the storm was shown graphically at Hammond Golf Club, where hundreds of pines were cut in half like branches. The trees had been planted 45 years ago by course founder Ernest Léonard, grandfather of the current course owner Leonard Gendron.
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“The trees fell like a house of cards,” said Gendron, 40.
Leonard Gendron, owner of Hammond Gold and Country Club, throws branches into the fire as he helps clean up after the right storm has cut down more than 300 trees on the ground. Photo by ERROL MCGIHON / Postmedia
A golf tournament was underway when the afternoon storm swept the Cumberland farmland from the west. A horn sounded to warn players to seek refuge.
A video recorded from Hammond’s clubhouse captures the violence of the storm: the wind is so fierce that the trees are unable to go back and forth to dissipate energy. The video captures a large pine tree, pushed by the relentless wind, breaking in half under the load.
“It was chaos and destruction,” Gendron said. “There was a lot of wind, a lot of rain, a lot of howls, the sound of trees breaking.”
Everyone left the course safely. But it was only when the storm subsided that the full extent of the damage was revealed: the trees piled up like string wood along the streets of holes 1, 4, 5, 10 and 18.
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Almost all the trees were evergreen. Gendron’s grandfather had mostly planted pines so that the streets would not be covered with leaves in the fall. But pines, with shallow roots and softwood, turned out to be one of the most vulnerable species to strong storm winds.
The course has been built on family-owned farmland since 1884. Gendron inherited the course at the age of 23 when his mother died in 2005.
“I’ve been here for many years and I’ve seen a lot of storms, but I’ve never experienced a storm like this,” he said.
Volunteers clean fallen trees at Hammond Golf and Country Club. Photo by Errol McGihon / Postmedia
About 50 volunteers, many of them club members, have attended the course each day this week to help cut down, clean and burn down the felled trees. Gendron offered them free lunch and beer from their own brewery, the Broken Stick Brewing Company.
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Pierre Berthiaume, 63, a retired civil servant, volunteered throughout the week to help with the cleanup. “We love playing here – this is my retirement plan,” Berthiaume said. “When we saw what the course was like after the storm, it was devastating, but at least now the streets will be a little more lenient.”
The nearby towns of Sarsfield, Hammond, Bourget and Saint-Pascale-Baylon suffered some of the most severe property damage in the region.
In Saint-Pascal-Baylon, large trees weighed on two houses on Du Lac Road. One owner had his garage swept away; another fell into a barn on a school bus.
The owner of the bus, Ghislain Leduc, said he could not get the bus out because he was afraid the rest of the barn would collapse. “We’re still thinking about what to do,” he said. “I think we’ll have to empty the barn first.”
Back at Hammond Golf Club, Gendron was preparing to reopen the course on Saturday morning.
“We’re going to have to reinvent the look of the course,” he said. “But it makes you feel good about what the community did here: it’s a real silver lining.”
In Saint-Pascal-Baylon, one of the cities in eastern Ottawa hard hit by the violent storm, one owner had his garage swept away, while another fell into a barn on a school bus. Photo by Andrew Duffy / Postmedia
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