Breaking Breakers

_{(No, not Benjamin.)}

That's not supposed to happen... is it?

A very strong wind-storm blasted through Ottawa last Monday afternoon. Apparently this apartment building lost it's roof - which promptly fell on the power-lines in the section that mWare is powered from...

Unwired.

The sign says to only park for one hour!
(Look at the roofline of the silver car)

Once it became clear that the power wasn't going to be restored quickly (and my UPSes had already faded), I called up a friend and borrowed his massive 7.5KW gas genset:

One Big Genset.

I was impressed, for such a large unit - it started on the first pull of the rip-cord, unfortunately, it was rather loud, and when I went for a walk later, I could it for about a block and a half.

Running: strong and loud

Thomas was telling me that the people at Iverlea were saying they needed a 9-storey crane to remove the old debris, and that the Hydro-crew has said they weren't going to do anything until the morning when the roof was repaired. I did not like that news at all.
So, about 6 hours after the power went out (and having not come back on), I set out to see if I could figure out why, despite being 4 blocks from the damage, and why other pockets of neighbours had power - and we didn't.
It was easy to figure out that our feeder-phase along Waverly was out, but at least one of them was live because as you walked along, some houses had lights on... and just before I got to Cartier, I found the open breaker... and a broken breaker.

Click for interactive Google Map

Fortunately, an Ottawa Hydro guy came around the corner just then and we conferred over the broken breaker - and they had it fixed it about 30 minutes later

While they were working, I approached a nearby police officer, I had a question:
"What's the deal with noise by-laws?"
"Well, it depends."
"Generator noise."
"Who has a generator?!"
"Err... Me."
"Oh. I see." (absolute sneer)
"Uhm, yeah, I don't want to get in any trouble... 11PM right?"
"Yeah - have it off by then."
"Okays."

Given they Hydro guys told me it'd take an hour to get things fixed, I was happy they were done, about 11:05. I should've left the generator running till 11 and just run on the UPS, but I wanted to watch them work... and collect the damaged goods. (And I'd need to shut some machines down anyway because they weren't on the UPS)

Broken Breaker
(Breaker! Breaker!)

I packed up and head home for the night.

---

Next morning I returned to nurse my Postgres server back to life, as there'd been a few more power-failures during that night that bled the UPS dry. Thomas said "At 5:00, the roof was still not removed but gone by 6:30. No sign of the crane."
I wandered over to take some photos, and one of the roofing company guys pointed out to me that across the street, a house had had a 12' long 2x4" ramming through their roof!

Hole in the roof of the house across the street from the apartment building.

Turned out the rest of the Iverlea's roof had fallen off during the second windstorm of the night/morning, so no crane was needed. They weren't planning on actually doing any repairs that day though because they needed to wait for more materials to arrive.

Rogers, Bell and Hydro trucks were circling nearby...

A quality cabling job by Rogers (And Bell, I think)

Apparently today they were all finished up, and looking much better:

5 chimneys again

Take a look at our photos, there's more to the story in them:
- Thomas' from Monday evening
- Mine from Monday Night
- Mine from Tuesday at noon