

Chris Fox and Paul Johnston, CP24.com





A few thousand residents in and around the city remain without power Wednesday night following a messy mix of precipitation that caused widespread outages Tuesday evening.

As of 8 p.m., Toronto Hydro said approximately 3,100 customers in Toronto were without power.

The areas still without power are:

· East and west of Jane Street to Queens Drive in the north to Lippincott Street in the south

· Victoria Park Avenue and Eglinton Avenue

· Hamer Boulevard to Dixon Road, west of York Road to east of Islington Avenue

· Finch Avenue to Sheppard Avenue, Weston Road to Arrow Road

"Some customers in areas hardest hit may be without power until tomorrow and should consider alternative arrangements," Toronto Hydro said Wednesday night. "Damage arising from these types of equipment failures is complex and time consuming."

At the peak of the outage Tuesday night, about 87,000 customers were without power. Approximately 15,000 customers remained without power as of 5 a.m. Wednesday.

"This was about a bit of ice and a whole bunch of salt at the top of these poles and it caused some arching over so we had almost 50 poles burn down over a very short period of time," Toronto Hydro CEO Anthony Haines told CP24 earlier Wednesday. "Also Hydro One lost three of its stations coming into Toronto, so we had both supply problems and problems with our distribution system."

Reflecting on his utility's response to the outage in general, Haines said there is "room for improvement" but lauded his team for their efforts.

"The thing that we have been focusing in on is getting the message out to customers in an effective way and letting customers call us. What went well last night is that we got an opportunity to use our new third-party supplier for some of our call centres, which worked," Haines said.

"We also had customers reporting outages remotely through our online and mobile services. Almost 100,000 customers reported or asked and got information from Toronto Hydro through all that new media and that is certainly a good news story."

Thousands without power in Markham

While thousands are still without power in Toronto the situation has improved dramatically elsewhere in the Greater Toronto Area, where power has been almost entirely restored to customers.

As of 2. p.m., Powerstream Inc. said that approximately 200 customers were in the dark in Markham after power was restored to about 4,300 others who were without power since Tuesday night.

At the peak of the outage Powerstream was reporting that more than 50,000 of its customers were without power in Markham, Richmond Hill, Aurora and Vaughan.

Hydro pole fires were to blame for the disruptions, Powerstream said.

"We have isolated a lot of the poles so there will be a number of customers that were directly fed from the poles that may not get restoration until the poles are replaced later this afternoon or this evening, but that is just a handful of customers," Powerstream spokesperson John Olthuis told CP24 earlier Wednesday.

The outages are not just affecting residential properties.

At 5:30 a.m. the TTC announced that subway service was suspended between Warden and Kennedy stations on Line 2 due to power issues at Kennedy Station. At 6:50 a.m. it was announced that service had also been suspended on the Scarborough RT due to signal issues at Kennedy SRT Station.

Service resumed on the Scarborough RT at around 8:30 a.m. and on Line 2 at 12:15 p.m.

Yorkdale Shopping Centre was also forced to close on Tuesday night due to a power outage, however the mall opened as scheduled Wednesday.

Remember for instant breaking news follow @CP24 on Twitter.