Hydro One contingency plan a catastrophic failure: senior engineers

TORONTO, ONTARIO - A group of Hydro One senior engineers have called their company's plan for coping with a strike or lockout of its professional employees a "catastrophic failure."

"What happened (May 27) is all the proof the public should need that Hydro One management is taking unnecessary risks with the electricity system. A few managers with a few weeks training cannot manage the system safely and reliably," said a Hydro One control supervisor. They're playing chicken with the public's electricity."

The media conference was called by the Society of Energy Professionals to report on the damage caused by the power outage of Friday, May 27th, and to highlight the risks the electricity system will operate under if Society-represented professionals are not on the job. While Hydro One officials minimized the outage, the engineers noted that approximately 2,300 megawatts of electricity was lost in the outage - the equivalent of blacking out two million households.

"The patterns in the disruptions we've seen were very similar to those we saw as the 2003 blackout occurred," said Lynn Andrews, another Hydro One engineer. "The outage caused the equipment of several major industrial customers to shut down. Thousands of computers were damaged, and sensitive industrial machinery went down, potentially resulting in hundreds of millions of lost dollars to the Ontario economy."

At the time of the outage, Hydro One management had removed its sector control supervisors, who are represented by the Society, from their responsibilities of overseeing the operation of Ontario's electricity transmission system. Temporary managerial replacements were substituted. The use of managerial replacements for skilled engineers and scientists is the core of what the government and Hydro One refer to as a "robust contingency plan" to ensure the safety and reliability of Ontario's energy system during a strike or lockout. The "contingency plan" is only necessary as support for Hydro One's demands that the Society accept concessions in its collective agreement.