DarkTO: Day 6

December 27th, 2013 by Potato

With the 6th day of the power outage coming to an end there’s still no sign of power for our street. The neighbourhood association got its hackles up after the Toronto Hydro soundbites today about being down to individual houses/house-to-house action when nearly a square kilometre was still dark for us. (The current wording is “localized neighbourhoods”.)

The utility still won’t provide anything like an estimate.

I can understand that in the first day, when trees were falling faster than lines were going back up, it was impossible to provide any estimates. But at that time we were told to prepare for up to three days. Some of us are well past double that, and it would be really good to know what kind of arrangements to make at this point — our frozen houses aren’t really habitable, and our relatives (though too polite to admit it) are clearly getting a little sick of our couch-surfing, house-crowding ways. For those who booked hotel rooms to stay warm, a generator might be cheaper than continuing to pay by the night if this is going to take another week. I’m fine on the couch and have my laptop for updates, but if I have to stay away for many more days I’m going to want to move more stuff out (and maybe grab more than 2 changes of clothes so I’m not constantly doing laundry at the in-laws’).

Though we bugged out early (largely because of Blueberry, partly because I had a bad feeling about the whole thing based on how terrible our power reliability has been in the best of times this year), it was hard to leave at the time because you keep thinking “any hour now…” I’ve been back to check on the house once or twice a day, and the neighbourhood is deserted now. I cleaned out our fridge and freezers, must be over $500 in spoiled food (and lots of home-made and frozen toddler dishes). Less than a third of it was salvageable.

On the news there was a factoid that the fire department is dealing with 10 times as many carbon monoxide calls as normally. I find that a really oddly low multiple with so many people trying to keep warm in unique ways. Is the baseline rate that high, or is it that the few cases we’ve heard about in the news are about it for carbon monoxide calls?

One Response to “DarkTO: Day 6”

  1. Rob Says:

    We were “lucky” in that we only were without power for 2 full days and spent the time in Mississauga at our daughter’s house before heading back home in time for Christmas eve. Of course our freezer/fridge food was a write-off (small stuff not to sweat over in the grand scheme of things). One bit of news, happily not being reported and hopefully not too prevalent, is no mention of neighbourhood break-ins. With so many away, it is a risk but I have seen the cops patrolling occasionally. Hope you get your power back soon dude.