Hydro Ottawa have been tracking and planning their response for the past couple of days to the severe winter storm that has made its way to Ottawa. This storm is expected to extend into Christmas Day. With this being said Hydro Ottawa activated their Incident Command Centre along with Crisis Management Teams on December 22 to manage and deploy resources as required. Both elements will remain in place until the storm has passed and our power supply is stable.
Projections continue to change, but sustained winds with gusts in the 60-80 km/h range are expected. The major uncertainty at this time is around the nature of the precipitation we will receive in Ottawa. A significant temperature change during the afternoon of December 23, will determine whether we experience a prolonged period of freezing rain or wet snow. The exact combination of wind and ice or snow loading will be the determining factor defining the impact to our infrastructure. Given the uncertainty around this weather event, Hydro Ottawa have also reached out and proactively secured some additional contracted resources to be on standby for restoration efforts as required over the coming days. While crews and contractors will work around the clock to restore power, I would ask that you be patient and understand that power restoration is a complex undertaking
at the best of times. Doing so under inclement weather conditions is even more complicated and time consuming. In addition to their operating system, Hydro Ottawa relies on customers to help pinpoint the cause of an outage, by:
● Calling our 24/7 outage hotline at 613-738-0188;
● Submitting it online through their MyAccount customer portal; or
● Through the Hydro Ottawa mobile app.
To find out the current status of an outage, residents are advised to visit our website and Outage Map at
www.hydroottawa.com/outages, which is updated every 15 minutes as new information comes in from
our crews.
Hydro Ottawa will continue to keep customers and the public informed of the situation through local media, social channels and in addition to their website via a new Storm Centre dedicated home page that will be live when their Crisis Communications Plan is activated.
