'Big ball of fire' scares St. Joachim resident as tangled Hydro One tower falls on shed
Toppled towers caused power outage for 3,000
Addie Laliberte was sitting in her living room Thursday evening when she was startled from her chair by a bright flash of light as a giant ball of fire came careening toward her.
"A great big ball of fire ... that's what it looked like, a great big ball of fire, was going to hit my window," she said.
When the St. Joachim woman got up to look outside she saw the transformer across the road smoking and shooting "little red fireballs" across the street.
"I was petrified," said the 74-year-old.
Laliberte was on the phone with her granddaughter at the time and said she barely had time to pray a "Hail Mary" before her television, lights and phone went dead.
The cause of the explosion didn't become clear until her neighbour came to investigate what happened and told her to take a look at her backyard.
"My neighbour came over and said the tower had fallen on the roof," she said. "I thought he had gone bezerk, but I looked out and there it was."
Tower collapses 'not common'
The tangled steel towers took out power to more than 3,000 Hydro One customers, according to the company's director of communications, Jay Armitage.
Windsor-Essex was walloped by a record snowfall Thursday, with heavy, slushy snow whipped by strong winds sticking to trees and power lines, but Armitage said it's too soon to tell what caused the towers to come down.
"Certainly we're investigating exactly what it is," she said. "Weather can be very, very hard on our infrastructure. When you think about freezing rain, wet snow, wind, all of those things have a big impact on our grid."
Armitage added that towers collapsing in this manner is "not very common."
There are all kinds of twisters all over it as if somebody whipped the car like you wouldn't believe.- Addie Laliberte
The falling towers damaged Laliberte's shed, a boat belonging to her daughter and the car parked in her driveway.
"You can see all across my car on the windows, on the roof and all the way down to the trunk lid are banged in quite a bit and there are all kinds of twisters all over it, as if somebody whipped the car like you wouldn't believe."
After the call to her granddaughter ended so abruptly, family members came by to make sure she was alright and spent the evening and much of Friday to make sure she was staying warm and dry as a trio of sump pumps worked to keep water from recent rainfalls out of her basement.
"[We're] just saying prayers and cuddling up with blankets," she said.
Hydro One crews are on scene at Laliberte's home and are working to remove the damaged towers, according to Armitage.
"We're going to continue to work with them ... in the long term to get their property restored."
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