The City of Ottawa's public housing corporation is investigating how an 18-storey building housing hundreds of seniors lost power, leaving residents without light, elevator service or the ability to cook a festive dinner during seven hours on Christmas Day.
Ron Larkin, CEO of Ottawa Community Housing, told CBCNews.ca on Thursday that Ottawa Community House is looking into the technical causes as well as how the company dealt with the outage in the 250-unit Somerset Towers building near Bank Street in downtown Ottawa starting around 2:30 p.m. ET Tuesday.
"We want to meet with the tenants to have a chat with them about this and to formally convey apologies to them, notwithstanding the fact that we believe the matter was out of our control," Larkin added.
Larkin said the division of ownership and responsibility for the equipment may have contributed to the problem, as the electrical equipment was owned and maintained by Ottawa Community Housing, but the complex containing the building is owned by another company, and access to the electrical equipment is controlled by Hydro Ottawa.
"I think there was some confusion on the site, if we can call it that, in getting the work done," he said, adding that the company is trying to clarify its agreements with Hydro Ottawa and the company that owns the building complex.
According to Hydro Ottawa spokeswoman Nathalie Lacombe, 19 other buildings were also affected by the outage, which was traced back to a faulty insulator inside Somerset Towers used to control the path of electricity in nearby power lines.
When the insulator failed, it tripped a breaker or fuse, which in turn caused some Hydro Ottawa equipment to short circuit, cutting power to all 20 buildings.
Lacombe said Hydro Ottawa told Ottawa Community Housing about the problem and restored power to the other 19 buildings by around 4 p.m.
However, the company was not asked to fix the problem in Somerset Towers until around 8 p.m., Lacombe said.
Power was finally restored around 9:30 p.m.
When asked if that type of equipment failure was caused by lack of maintenance, she said, "I can't say it's not, but I don't think it was."
She added that the room seemed clean and well maintained.
Larkin said the equipment had been checked a year ago, and at that point, everything was fine.
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