(No, not Benjamin.)
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...
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:
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.
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.
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)
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!
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...
Apparently today they were all finished up, and looking much better:
Take a look at our
photos, there's more to the story in them:
-
Thomas' from Monday evening
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Mine from Monday Night
-
Mine from Tuesday at noon
Last night, from 9PM till at least 2AM I heard a near-incessant 'back-up beep' from some distant vehicle. Drove me up the wall. If I didn't own my E5s, I'd've had a very lousy night's sleep. (And it was very irritating working until I put 'em in at 2) Comments (2)
Tracked: Aug 11, 01:48
... especially when there's nothing wrong with the circuit! mWare was offline from about 23:10 till 01:16 tonight due to another power failure. 40A Fuse, 2400 VAC feeder (4160 VAC phase-to-phase BTW) Same problem, same crew to fix it... these guys Comments (2)
Tracked: Mar 05, 03:40