

Chris Fox, CP24.com





There’s finally an explanation for that strange flicker of lights we all saw Monday night.

Hydro One said a “voltage disturbance” caused a flickering of lights for customers across Ontario. Twitter exploded with people reporting the flickering lights from as far east as Ottawa to the Niagara region in the west.

The flicker happened at about 9:26 p.m. due to a momentary issue on Hydro One’s transmission system.

Though the actual cause of the event is still under investigation, the utility company said early reports indicate it resulted from a broken piece of equipment that held a power line off a transmission tower in Etobicoke. The malfunction of the equipment in turn caused a transmission line to be released. That transmission line then made contact with another line.

In a press release issued Tuesday morning, Toronto Hydro said it will investigate “what role weather and salt contamination might have played” in the malfunction of the equipment.

“Hydro One proactively monitors and mitigates salt contamination on its equipment through power-washing. These efforts have been hampered this year due to extreme and prolonged cold temperatures,” the release said.

In the wake of the flickering of lights on Monday night, many Torontonians took to social to media to report the issue and speculate on what may have caused it.

That curiosity even extended to Kathleen Wynne’s house, where the premier wondered aloud about what might have caused the brief outage.

“I was at home and whenever that happens my thought is that it is extremely important that we do everything in our power to make sure that our power supply is reliable and that when there is a problem, it (the electricity) is returned as quickly as possible,” Wynne told reporters in Barrie Tuesday afternoon.

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