by Judi McLeod
January 24, 2005
For some downtown highrise dwellers, it's a scene straight out of science fiction. Wandering souls trekking up and down concrete stairwells powered by the dim light of backup power generators.
Too afraid to take the elevators when the lights are mercifully switched back on.
From early morning until early evening yesterday, a single broken water pipe kept the power off in a huge swath of beautiful downtown Toronto.
It's a scene getting too familiar in a city whose apartment complexes are as aging as its infrastructure.
"…I was alone in the laundry room when it happened," a tenant told me in the building lobby yesterday morning. "Of course I thought immediately of my children up on the 25th floor. and it didn't help that while waiting for the dryer, I happened to be reading a book called Fear when of a sudden everything went pitch black."
The mother of four was better off than people trapped in the building's elevators.
By early afternoon, an exodus of tenants kept heading out the south door, strapped down with overnight duffel bags, Sony Walkmans and computers. It wasn't just because we had heard the nearby Marriott Hotel was now evacuating its guests, transporting them to motels in city outskirts--the same place we were headed. It was because highrise staff was telling us stories about elevator nightmares. When the power was shut off, one tenant was abandoned in an elevator for more than three hours; staff could not promise how long generators could keep the elevators going.
Senior staffer Dennis was fending off complaining tenants. It didn't help that no one knew who had the key to get to the generator or that the first three flashlights he tried had dead batteries.
alarms have sent the tenants of this highrise rushing to street level for the past month-- including early in the morning the day before the blackout. Fire fighters tell us it's broken pipes that keep their engines racing to the building, a frustration borne out the morning of our cautious return from suburb motels. The lobby was flooded. Ruining any happy homecoming were the cascades of water gushing down elevator doors, keeping us in cautious mode. a strange new elevator noise that sounded like canaries singing made my ride up seems like forever. It was the sound of electricity and not the birds singing, another returnee promptly informed me.
People who couldn't vacate the building for one reason or another told me that by late afternoon they could blow frost rings at each other inside candlelit apartments.
It was all too reminiscent of the major blackout of august 2003, but this was different. It's early Canadian winter with sub-zero temperatures dipping to as low as 35-40 below if you factor in the wind chill.
Difficult to believe that this is the Toronto our politicians brag is a Worldclass City and not arctic Yellowknife.
Some downtown tenants fled to the Eaton Centre for light and warmth and a place to take their children, only to be sent out by security guards when no power shut the major tourist area down.
From the moment the lights went out, hospitals and hotels were forced onto backup generators.
For people flooding frigid street, there was nowhere to go in order to come in out of the cold in much of the downtown core.
We were originally set to head to Canada Free Press's nearby Elm Street office with sleeping bags, until CFP manager Brian Thompson, who lives in the same highrise reminded us that power was out there too.
after putting up at a Lakeshore motel, which kindly took in office mascot Kiko too, we worried most about the CFP site being down.
Only the day before, we had launched our premier weekend edition, bringing our site to six-day-a-week status, something we were so proud of.
at the motel, we mulled over the possibility of an added backup server, perhaps in Montreal or Vancouver.
In the end, it was water from a single broken pipe, most likely frozen in the weekend's subzero weather. Or as CFP would put it "another broken waterpipe".
When water began flooding the underground vault of the hydro substation at Bay, just south of Dundas, Toronto Hydro shut the power off for safety's sake.
Problem isn't just that they were unable to restore downtown power for some 11 hours, it's that none of our governments at any level are doing anything about our crumbling infrastructure. Or for the city's aging apartment dwellings either.
according to Toronto Sun reporter Rob Granatstein, who documented information a week before the blackout, "Toronto' s $52 billion worth of aging infrastructure is being held together by duct tape and baling wire".
Given that Toronto is now served by three liberal-left governments in Socialist, "No- PVC-pipe- here" Mayor David Miller, Liberal, politically-correct, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty and globe-trotting, Tamil terrorist-loving Prime Minister Paul Martin, it may as well be held together with wads of pink bubblegum.
Meanwhile, wandering souls pass each other in the dank stairwells of some downtown highrises, where few tenants look for better stability from elected politicians any time soon.
Canada Free Press founding editor Most recent by Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media. Her work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck. Judi can be reached at: judi@canadafreepress.com
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