Weekly newsletter: April 11, 2023
There’s a certain cruelty that comes with the weather we had over the last week. Other than branches left curbside for collection, nobody would know that our city just went through another winter storm.
On the surface, we got to see the incredible amount of work that goes into recovery efforts following a major event, such as forestry crews inspecting trees, public works crews cleaning up, and road crews repairing vital infrastructure that may have been damaged.
Did you know it’s all coordinated by the Emergency Operations Centre (EOC) behind the scenes?
The EOC is activated a day or two before any potentially disruptive event, whether it’s weather, events, or demonstrations. Consisting of staff from most city departments, the EOC ensures updates are consistent and shared amongst all departments before, during, and after major events.
For example, prior to last week’s ice storm, road crews included an update on preventative measures (pre-salting some locations, equipment preparation) and other readiness efforts.
Following the storm, public works communicated information about tree branch collection and how it would be completed. All this information is shared with Councillor’s offices, and in turn communicated with you.
The EOC also ensures departments are communicating with each other to allow smooth and efficient recovery efforts, despite the involvement of multiple departments. It also avoids unnecessarily duplicated efforts.
Similarly, Hydro Ottawa coordinates their response independently, but maintains regular contact with the EOC. Although Hydro has their own crews to address anything needed to facilitate repairs to its infrastructure, city work crews help where needed and where possible.
Hydro Ottawa also coordinates the call for additional resources from neighbouring utilities. Over the weekend, crews from Burlington and London (among others) were in town to help with power restoration.
Parts of our community were frustrated at yet another multiday power restoration effort in less than a year. That’s an unfortunate reality of older areas of the ward here the power infrastructure is exclusively above-ground.
This represents linear points of failure (weather or no weather), including distribution lines along main roads and service lines that connect to individual homes, that can be affected by factors within and beyond control.
Normally, Hydro Ottawa trims 60,000 trees per year as a preventative measure, but a combination of sequential major weather events and work stoppages early in the pandemic has delayed their efforts significantly.
As electricity always finds the path of least resistance, something as simple as a branch briefly coming in contact with a line could trip transformers to protect the rest of the network. Similarly, a repair at one location may not resolve the outage as it could trip a breaker down the line or could be just one of several locations that need repair.
That roughly explains why compared to other areas of Barrhaven, Hearts Desire and Rideau Glen often need the most time for crews to identify and repair issues. Contrast that to newer neighbourhoods, where issues and repairs at a single location can cover a much larger area.
Burying wires is the most obvious and best solution to preventing most future outages, but the initiative is prohibitively expensive. The investment required is why line burials are often integrated with other projects like road rebuilding and rehabilitation.
City staff and I have identified a few locations where burial can be integrated with future projects, but most of them are at least years away and pending funding.
Lastly, residents with tree cuttings may place them at the curb for regular waste collection tomorrow (Wednesday, April 12). Please bundle smaller branches if possible.
Larger branches or tree stumps may also be left at the curb, but those will be collected (or chipped on site) by separate city crews or contractors. This may take up to a few weeks, but the material may be left at the curbside without risking by-law fines.
Residents may also transport their tree cuttings to the Trail Road landfill at 4475 Trail Road. The facility is open weekdays 7:00 am to 6:00 pm, and disposal fees have been temporarily waived for these materials.
That was a lot of reading, but that’s all for this week! Go outside and enjoy the weather if you can. It’s going to be beautiful out… until the next snowfall!
-Wilson