Highrise apartments and condominiums need far bigger backup power systems in case of extended power outages, says the chair of the panel that studied Toronto Hydro’s response to the ice storm last December .

In some ways the city simply lucked out that no elderly or disabled people died in highrises because of the blackout, David McFadden said in presenting the report.

“Think of how many senior citizens, people who are ill, are up 30 storeys in a building,” he told a news conference. “If they had a health emergency and the elevators aren’t working, who gets there? We need as a society to think about this.”

The panel gave Toronto Hydro a passing grade for its performance during crippling the ice storm, which hit the city just before Christmas, leaving a million residents in the dark.

But it said there’s room for improvement in many areas, including getting information out to worried customers.

The report notes practically none of Toronto’s highrise apartments and condominiums have backup generators capable of running essential services such as elevators, heat and phones for an extended period.

“There’s a potential for catastrophe if we’re not careful,” McFadden said.

That’s why the panel recommends the province amend the Ontario Building Code to require all highrise residential buildings — old and new — install backup generators or power supplies that can enable people trapped for extended periods to cook, have lights, keep warm and have contact with the outside world.

The code currently requires only enough power for safe evacuation in the event of a fire and to “assist in firefighting operations.”

Panel member Sean Conway — who lives in a 51-storey building near Yonge and Bloor — said better emergency power in highrises is essential because “we’re growing up, and we’re growing older.”

But the report’s main focus was on Toronto Hydro’s performance, which the panel concludes restored power “in a manner consistent with industry practices.”

The storm was a severe one, with 57 per cent of Toronto Hydro customers losing power at some point.

“The performance was within industry norms,” said Miki Deric, an expert consultant hired by the panel. “There was nothing here that the company dropped the ball on.”

Anthony Haines, chief executive of Toronto Hydro, said the company accepts the report and is already working on putting it into practice.

With tree limbs raining down onto hydro lines, some critics wondered why more of the Toronto Hydro system isn’t underground, safe from ice storms. But both the panel and the utility said that’s not a magic solution.

For one thing, Haines said, to install the entire system underground would cost about $15 billion — and would triple rates.

Deric said it’s not the best solution for all parts of the system, especially in areas prone to flooding.

But Haines said Toronto Hydro will consider burying the lines running into individual houses from the street, which are the most vulnerable to falling branches.

Better tree trimming is one of the keys to keeping wires safe during such a storm. But even that’s not a simple proposition. City policy is to increase Toronto’s tree canopy — currently 29 per cent of its area — to 40 per cent, which means more trees, not fewer.

Panel member Carlos Torres — an executive with Consolidated Edison of New York — said he’s seen conflict over that issue. Utilities started an aggressive tree trimming campaign several years ago in Connecticut following a major storm and are now encountering pushback from residents who don’t want their trees hacked out.

That means revisiting city guidelines that put hydro lines and front yard trees on exactly the same corridor. “Even a small setback (from each other) is going to make a large difference,’ said Gomes.

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City manager Joe Pennachetti, who sat on the panel, said he’ll report to city council on how the city’s tree policy meshes with the hydro system.

The panel also flagged the inability of Toronto Hydro’s call centre to handle the flood of calls during the storm. Many callers simply couldn’t get through.

“The pipe wasn’t as big as it needed to be. We have to wear some of this,” Haines said.

At the same time, he said the volume of calls received by Toronto Hydro during the crisis would have swamped the call centres of all the utilities in the country combined.

The panel said the company didn’t have enough ways of communicating to people without power — such as trucks with loud speakers, door hangers or town hall meetings.

It said Toronto Hydro should contract out to companies that handle huge call centre overflows: they don’t have live operators but do have voice recognition software that can log calls and enter information into a computer system.

The jam-up at the Toronto Hydro call centre left customers unable to report outages — and unable to get accurate estimates of when their power might be restored. Haines said the utility is working on systems to improve that.

Some hydro workers said confusion reigned in the field during the peak of the ice storm, with line crews unable to contact control centres due to overloaded radio systems. And some linemen reported being sent to areas to carry out repairs that had already been fixed.

Deric said it’s not an easy thing to muster the resources when power suddenly goes out for hundreds of thousands of customers in locations that can’t be predicted.

“You don’t have the luxury of doing all the planning ahead of time,” he said. “There’s going to be a certain amount of time that’s just going to be wasted, naturally.”

“In every event that we have seen, there are inefficiencies as a result of bringing all these resources all at once, trying to get the power restored. You will never get everybody in the right place, at the right time, all the time in these events. They’re just so big.”

Haines said nothing in the report is likely to force Toronto Hydro to ask for a special rate increase beyond those already in the pipeline.