Update – Hydro One’s Ice Storm Restoration April 11, 2025

(Today’s Northumberland file photo)

Restoration by the numbers

• Crews have restored power to more than 99.6 per cent of customers since the start of this generational ice storm (March 28, 11 p.m.). Crews continue to work tirelessly through the widespread and significant damage to make repairs and rebuild local electricity infrastructure.
• All residential customers that crews can safely access are restored. Work continues to restore power to the 1,009 residential customers and 5,140 secondary customers (cottages/trailers) where there are access issues creating unsafe conditions for crews. This includes partially frozen lakes and the inability to safely land our helicopters along with localized flooding, especially in parts of Fenelon Falls.
• In these final stages of restoration, we are releasing most of our Mutual Assistance utility and contractor resources as our crews can support the remaining restoration work.
• Hydro One crews continue to focus on restoring power and reconnecting customers that had damage to their owned equipment and have passed the Electrical Safety Authority inspection.
• Our team of full-time foresters continue to support restoration. This team also conducts our ongoing vegetation maintenance work to remove trees and brush from powerlines to support power quality and reliability across the province. Hydro One is one of the only utilities with an in-house forestry team 552 employees strong.

Storm recap

• This ice storm was a generational storm that devastated parts of central and eastern Ontario. Freezing rain started on Friday, March 28 and continued into late Sunday. The weight of the ice accumulation caused trees to fall, lines to collapse and more than 2,700 poles to break.
• Damage was severe and compounded during this three-day storm. The same regions saw high winds and additional freezing rain on April 2.
• Hydro One crews, alongside Canadian utilities and contractors, worked day and night in freezing rain, snow and wind to restore power.
• Throughout this event, we have received Mutual Assistance from our Canadian contractors and 30 utility partners.
• We thank crew members from Alectra, Algoma Power, Bluewater Power, Centre Wellington Hydro, CNP Fort Erie, Elexicon, Enwin, Entergus, Enova Power, Epcor, Essex Power, ERTH Power, Grand Bridge Energy, Hydro Ottawa, Kingston PUC, Lakefront Utilities, London Hydro, Milton Hydro, Niagara Peninsula Energy, New Brunswick Power, Oakville Hydro, Ottawa River Power, Oshawa PUC, PUC Service (Sault Ste. Marie), Quebec Hydro, Renfrew Hydro, Toronto Hydro, Wasaga Power, Wellington North Power and Westario Power.
• We also saw neighbours helping neighbours. We thank the restaurants that fed our crews, the hotels that provided them with warm beds, and all of the coffee, hot meals and kind words that continue to keep their spirits high.
• Hydro One’s Ice Storm 2025: Recovery Grant launched on April 7. Directly impacted Indigenous communities and municipalities can apply for a grant of up to $10,000 to support relief and recovery efforts in their local community. Apply at www.hydroone.com/about/sustainability/communities#ice-storm.

Looking forward

• As part of Hydro One’s standard operating procedure following any type of significant storm, we will review what we’ve learned during this generational storm. This allows us to update our response plans and implement feedback received from customers, First Nations, community leaders and other stakeholders.
• Our review will include things like our approach to assessing damage, establishing estimated times of restoration and the functionality of our outage communication tools (outage map/app and proactive alerts).
• With 126,000 circuit kilometres of primary distribution lines, much of which traverses rural Ontario through off-road terrain including heavily forested areas, Canadian Shield and lakes, burying our lines is cost prohibitive.
• Resiliency is about more than hardening of the grid’s infrastructure, it includes our work to prepare, respond to and continually adapt our operational response to severe weather events.
• Examples of how we are hardening our transmission infrastructure include building our transmission stations to mitigate risks such as flooding, wind and ice damage, lightning strikes or large volumes of snow accumulation.
• We are also investing in innovation and technology. Examples include increasing automation on our distribution system to allow us to better identify a potential issue and more quickly resolve it.

Regional breakdown

• Below is the updated regional breakdown by operations centre that includes number of outages and customers restored since the beginning of the storm on Friday, March 28, and the number of active outages and customers without power at this time. This includes customers that require an ESA inspection before they can be reconnected.
• The number of secondary properties affected by outages is included for each operations centre. These numbers are part of the total in the number of customers without power column.
• These areas do not align with municipal boundaries, they are our broken down by our operations centres. A map of our operations centres’ service area can be found below.

Author: Pete Fisher

Has been a photojournalist for over 30-years and have been honoured to win numerous awards for photography and writing over the years. Best selling author for the book Highway of Heroes - True Patriot Love