Don't expect compensation, Toronto Hydro tells CityPlace residents after 4th outage in 2 weeks

Toronto Hydro won't be offering compensation to its customers at CityPlace condo buildings, even after residents there lost power Wednesday for the fourth time in two weeks.

The utility says it isn't required to do so unless negligence was a cause.

"We don't guarantee power to our customers 100 per cent of the time," Toronto Hydro spokesperson Brian Buchan told CBC News Thursday.

"There would need to be some negligence found or some mitigating circumstances that would require us to then pay out for that," he added. 

• Power restored to CityPlace buildings and surrounding area after 18 hours

Toronto Hydro is still looking into whether Wednesday night's thunderstorm played a role in the outage but says its crews were busy responding to calls about wires down and other public safety problems, which meant it took them longer to get to the condo buildings for repair work, prolonging the outage by several hours.

'An extraordinary circumstance'

Buchan told CBC News both power feeding cables in the area have failed over the past 10 days, something he called "an extraordinary circumstance."

Last weekend, the utility replaced 250 metres of cable to compensate for one of the failed feeders. On Wednesday night, a second one failed, forcing crews to switch to the new backup.

"It's cold comfort to hear that Hydro's put a permanent solution in place when you have four of these take place within a span of a week and a half," Coun. Joe Cressy said Thursday.

"That doesn't take away from the inconvenience that was there and I would encourage residents to certainly use the compensation criteria that exists if they were unduly inconvenienced."

Buchan says some of the power-feeding cables are more than 50 years old and Toronto Hydro is trying to replace them but, "unfortunately, equipment does fail at times."

Don't expect to pay less on hydro, utility says

Toronto Hydro was also dealing with three other pockets of outages from the storm last night and Buchan said that's partially why power wasn't fully restored to CityPlace until just after 6 a.m.

"We just didn't have the resources to get someone down there to flip them over to the backup power," Buchan said. 

Buchan said now that the power is back on, the utility will conduct an investigation to determine what caused the power outage for CityPlace's nine buildings. Toronto Hydro will also consider other measures including putting in overhead power lines and even bringing generators into the buildings.

But in terms of relief on their electricity bills, Buchan says CityPlace residents shouldn't expect to pay any less despite the outages.

"We're not in a position from a regulatory standpoint, or business standpoint for that matter, to provide a level of relief," said Buchan, adding residents looking for compensation should follow up with their insurance companies.