Rothesay N.B. Power customers: The unlucky one per cent on Christmas Day
Holiday blackouts were caused by heavy snow on trees now targeted for trimming
N.B. Power has tried to assure Rothesay-area customers who spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in the dark that it's taking a proactive approach to grid reliability, from regular maintenance to modernizing equipment to prompt tree trimming.
At a meeting Tuesday night requested by the Town of Rothesay, the utility said stormy weather on Christmas Eve caused snow-laden trees to make contact with distribution lines in the Kennebecasis Valley, causing outages for 2,600 customers by 6:15 pm.
The impact was hardest in Rothesay, a town of about 12,000, but customers in Grand Bay, Hampton and St. Martins were also affected.
"Fewer than 2 per cent of customers across the province experienced outages on December 24," said printed hand-outs.
Another 1,600 customers then lost power on Christmas Day, with some homes sitting dark and cold from around 4 p.m. and overnight into Boxing Day.
"It's never a good time to lose power," said Nicole Poirier, N.B. Power's vice-president of operations. "We understood there were concerns, and we actually wanted to come and address that with the public."
Already, she said, crews have started clearing vegetation.
Tree-cutting budget bumped to $16.8M
N.B. Power says it takes a number of steps to ensure reliability. Transmission lines are inspected by helicopter every year and ground-level inspections are done every four to eight years.
Methods for controlling vegetation include manual trimming, mechanical clearing and targeted herbicide application — only on transmission lines and under professional supervision.
Poirier said a four-week tree-trimming blitz has already started along Grove Avenue, Hampton Road, Highland Avenue, Tennis Court Road and Rothesay Park Road.
Provincewide, N.B. Power will spend $16.8 million on tree-clearing this fiscal year.
That's a return to spending levels in the wake of post-tropical storm Arthur. In July 2014, Arthur blew through New Brunswick, knocking out electricity to more than 200,000 N.B. Power customers, some for more than a week.
The tree-cutting program grew to $15.5 million in 2018 but in following years, spending was cut back, falling to $12.5 million in 2019.
Figures supplied by N.B. Power this week indicate continued ups and downs in the "vegetation management budget" starting in 2021-22, when it was $15.1 million. It dropped to $13.9 million the next year but is expected to be $17.2 million in 2025-26.
Problems with estimated restoration times
Tuesday's information session started at 6 p.m. at the Wells Community Centre and by 6:30, the room was full. The sound was so loud, it was sometimes difficult for people to hear one another as they made their way around to the various information stations. Under this setup, there was no central presentation or opportunity to ask questions in front of the larger group.
"I figured this is what they were going to do to avoid conflict," Willie Spence said. "By doing this, you don't have everybody screaming and hollering at them wanting more answers."
As a home dialysis patient Spence says he was frustrated by the estimated restoration times posted on the N.B. Power outages web site — estimates that were off, he said, by many hours.
"I'm trying to make the decision about whether I've got to leave or stay in my house and try to do my dialysis," he said. "Without having the machine being able to run, I can't do my dialysis. And then I get sick."
WATCH | Outages in Rothesay a very rare event, N.B. Power says at public meeting:
"You get a quote online for six o'clock. Then you say, OK, I'll stay in my apartment. Then you get a quote that comes back again later that says 9 o'clock. Then the next time, it's 11 o'clock."
N.B. Power said it is working toward a smarter grid so crews and engineers can gather more information about where the power is out and why it's out.
Over Christmas, however, it still came down to workers walking under the lines, pushing through deep snow, scanning the grid with their flashlights.
"You'll see people in backyards trying to find the issue," said Phil Landry, executive director of the project management office and engineering.
He said the estimated times of restoration, or ETRs, are based on what N.B. Power crews think the problem is and what it will take to fix it. However, sometimes the failure turns out to be more complicated than they thought.
"At times there's more than one problem," Landry said. "That's when you see things will change in terms of our ETRs."
Landry says N.B. Power is going to put a communication system on top of the distribution system, which will provide more information on where the faults are.
"On top of that, we're going to have smart meters. So with a smarter system in place, when there are outages, we'll be better positioned to see where those issues are. And that will allow us to get to those issues quicker."
Dinner's ruined
Gina Chiarella said she came to the meeting partly out of concern for her neighbours.
She said her apartment building is full of seniors.
"Half of them were having kids and grandkids over for Christmas dinner and the power goes off at 4:30. There goes your turkey and everything. What do you do? I think the power came back on at 5 a.m., but we were all in bed. I imagine it ruined a lot of dinners."
"Had it been really cold, that really makes a difference," said Richard Hull, who lost power on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. He said he and his wife bundled up their Christmas ham and took it to their son's house. They then came home at 10 o'clock and went to bed under extra blankets.
"We have a wood stove but the thing is, we have well water. So when we lose power, we've got no water."
The town said complaints started escalating after Christmas Day.
"We started getting calls and demands, really, that the town needed to advocate on behalf of some of the residents to help them with this issue," said Brett McLean, Rothesay's chief administrative officer.
McLean said he's satisfied with N.B. Power's bid to move resources into tree-cutting in the community.
"Here we are, only the early part of February, from an outage that happened over Christmas, and and the solution's in the works," he said.
N.B. Power said power was available in Rothesay 99.86 per cent of the time in 2024, compared to 99.89 percent in 2023.
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