Power restored to thousands of customers in the northeast

A tough day to be without power Thursday was a cold tough day to have no hydro – but that was briefly the case for many people in and around the Timmins area today.

More than 20,000 Hydro One customers lost power Thursday morning in the northeast amid extreme cold temperatures as dozens still wait to be restored Thursday afternoon.

Officials with Hydro One say power was restored to around 20,000 affected customers at around 12:20 p.m.

The outage affected more than 1,200 customers from Westree north to Foleyet, more than 1,000 customers between Timmins and Matheson and nearly 2,900 customers from Moonbeam west to Opasatika.

Power officials said upon inspection, crews deemed it safe to restore power to homes affected by that outage.

As of 2:45 p.m. all but a few dozen customers were restored.

The cause of the outage is still under investigation, but Hydro One media relations advisor Tiziana Boccega Rosa told CTV News that its size means there was an issue with the transmission system.

“It’s the super highway that is getting electricity from where it’s being generated in the province, to where it needs to go,” she said.

“The reason why the outage was so large is because it happened on that transmission system.”

Boccega Rosa said any other residents experiencing outages in and around the region after about 3 p.m. were either dealing with other unrelated outages or scheduled work.

The weather conditions in Timmins around the noon hour was sunny and -20 C, but -28 C with the wind chill. The temperature is expected to increase to -24 C with the wind chill by 2 p.m.

The City of Timmins has issued an extreme cold alert.

– With files from CTV News Northern Ontario video journalist Sergio Arangio