Aging infrastructure may have caused a prolonged power outage in Sarnia's Twin Lakes area on Wednesday.
Bluewater Power reported an unplanned outage in the city's north end shortly after midnight, affecting 133 customers.
"We're still in the midst of it. A couple of times we thought we had it beat and it just didn't work out that way. So we're starting with an original fault, the original fault that shortly after midnight — that was actually a failed cable, it put about 10 times the current through the line and now we're seeing subsequent failures from that original failure," said Bluewater Power President and CEO Janice McMichael-Dennis. "So we are working through this, we are continuing to investigate, and to test, and to fix the — kind of like the domino equipment failure that happened from that original fault."
Power was restored to some households before noon, but as of 2 p.m. the utility's outage map showed 91 customers still without electricity.
McMichael-Dennis offered apologies to those customers.
"We take this really seriously. We take a system failure as our own failure so we put our hearts and souls into this," she said. "We're working on it and we'll get our customers there."
As to what caused the original fault, McMichael-Dennis said more data needs to be collected but they suspect it resulted from aging infrastructure.
"That's an older subdivision and older infrastructure, it's actually due on our replacement list for subdivision and infrastructure in the next 12 months so it certainly shows us that our instincts were right," she said. "We believe it was just an older infrastructure failure at this point. We'll do some more testing on that exact equipment to see if there was anything else at play there."