March 17, 2015

March 17, 2015

First and foremost, thank you for your ongoing patience and support. This has been a very challenging season for us all.

Over the past week almost every customer in Halton Hills has been affected by power outages.

Outages have been caused by a number of factors. Most recently, we have had outages caused by tree branches contacting our lines, insulators arcing and pole fires due to salt contamination. With the long spell of cold weather we have experienced this year, we have not had the normal freeze thaw cycle that keeps our equipment cleaned of road salt and brine. This means that salt builds up on the insulators and in moist, misty conditions, has become a conductor of electricity causing arcing and pole fires. These types of outages could continue until we experience a heavy rain.

We maintain a three year line clearing cycle where we trim trees along all of our lines, however, trees outside of the zone we maintain can also lose branches or fall causing outages. While we maintain active line maintenance and line clearing programs, these proactive measures could not prevent the types of outages we have experienced. Halton Hills Hydro maintains 1500 km of lines and 8800 hydro poles in a service territory of 255 sq. km.

Our crews are always available 24/7 to deal with any power outages as they happen. When an outage occurs, our control room dispatches a crew to locate the problem. Often information we receive from our customers helps us narrow down the search area and then the crew patrols the lines until the problem is located. Once the problem is identified, our crews work to resolve the issue as quickly and safely as possible. When the cause of the outage is affecting the Hydro One supply lines coming into our service territory, we must coordinate our efforts with their crews as well.

At Halton Hills Hydro, we are committed to providing electricity distribution excellence and while we cannot prevent all outages, we work to restore power as quickly as possible when one happens.

Outage information is available on our website, Facebook and Twitter accounts. You can report an outage directly to our control room using our website.

We appreciate your understanding, and cooperation.

Thank you,

Art Skidmore

President & CEO

Providing Halton Hills with electricity distribution excellence in a safe and reliable manner.