Why some Nepean areas may see longer and more frequent power outages

Just minutes after the power goes out in the Manordale neighbourhood, the sounds of gas-powered generators begin their mechanical symphony through the area.

Resident Brittany Lauzon, who lives in a farmhouse that’s more than 100 years old, says power outages are such a common occurrence in the neighbourhood that, by now, almost everyone has thought of a backup plan to keep their lights on in case of an outage.

Often, she says, it’s a community-wide effort. Her neighbour lets her hook her fridge up to his generator. She turns on her smaller gas-powered generator to keep her fish tanks and other household necessities running. Everyone knows to turn their generators off at night to minimize noise.

“We just have a system in our neighbourhood because we have so many outages,” she said. “It made me realize that, yeah, we have a problem around here.”

Her family would ultimately love to phase out the gas energy system in their house and switch over to electricity, but with frequent outages, she said that just isn’t realistic.

“We refuse to get rid of our gas fireplace, because we literally think we never know when the power is going to go out, and that room keeps us warm,” she said.

Any time the power flickers out, Lauzon said her neighbours start playing a game of broken telephone to figure out why it happened or how long it’ll last. Communication from Hydro Ottawa, she said, is infrequent and the outage map often isn’t up to date.

Some power outages are unplanned and caused by factors such as equipment failure, fallen trees or adverse weather, according to Hydro Ottawa, while others are planned as part of scheduled maintenance work.

Judy Bond, who also lives in Manordale, said her power tends to go out a few times a year. Living in a neighbourhood with aging infrastructure, she said she knows to expect the occasional outage.

But she said it often takes 20 to 30 minutes for the Hydro Ottawa outage map to be updated with a timeline and explanation, leaving her sitting in the dark refreshing her screen as she wonders what happened and how long she’ll be without power.

Other Nepean residents say this problem isn’t unique to the Manordale neighbourhood. Residents in small pockets of areas like McKellar Park and Crestview say they’ve also developed contingency plans to account for the fact that the power may go out at any moment.

While older neighbourhoods throughout Ottawa tend to feature more mature infrastructure, a Hydro Ottawa spokesperson said there’s no data to suggest that it makes these areas more susceptible to power outages “compared to similar residential neighbourhoods.”

Asked how many outages occurred in the city’s wards in the last year, Hydro Ottawa said it was unable to provide specific numbers.

Knoxdale-Merivale Coun. Sean Devine, whose ward includes neighbourhoods like Manordale and stretching as far north as Fisher Heights, said he’s noticed that many city outages will impact his residents.

“In most of Ottawa’s outages, they will affect my ward,” Devine said in an interview. “They will affect the neighbouring wards, all of the older established wards where all of the infrastructure is kind of the same era.”

He said these neighbourhoods may be more susceptible to outages because of the combination of large trees and above-ground power lines. One bad storm could blow a tree branch into a power line, cutting power for an entire community.

Data collected by Hydro Ottawa shows that tree contact caused 78 power outages in the city in 2025, with disruptions typically happening “when storms blow branches into wires or when trees fall and break lines.”

Tree contact was the third-most common cause of a power outage this year, behind only the 144 instances of foreign interference (with 103 of those instances caused by animals like squirrels, birds and raccoons) and 140 instances of equipment failure.

Following a meeting with Hydro Ottawa, Devine said he learned that 59 per cent of the outages in his ward this year were caused by equipment failure, while 39 per cent were caused by a loss of power supply.

Devine said Hydro Ottawa told him that outages in this area can also be more widespread and last longer due to a lack of power line redundancy, meaning if the primary power line fails, there are very few backup routes available to reach the affected neighbourhoods.

Frequent and sporadic power outages are the reason that Crestview-Meadowlands resident Julia Watson-Blasioli decided to buy a generator for her home. It’s large enough to run her fridge and freezer, as well as to keep the internet going in her family’s house.

“We’re on a grid that shuts off pretty easily,” she said. “That’s one of the reasons why we decided to get the generator, because we can’t trust the fact that it won’t be out again for three or four days.”

Hydro Ottawa’s 2026-2030 investment plan will involve investment to “maintain and replace aging assets,” among other things, according to the plan document.

For some residents living in these older neighbourhoods, frequent power outages simply come with the territory. But for McKellar Park resident Tudor Robins, Hydro Ottawa’s communication throughout outages is a source of frustration.

She said she’s rarely aware of what’s going on ahead of outages she later finds out had been planned for weeks. She said she’ll sometimes get a text message 20 minutes after the power goes out informing her of the “upcoming outage.”

“It just builds up into a tolerance of thinking, ‘Here we go again,’ ” she said. “As long as we’ve had communication from Hydro, it’s been incomplete and incorrect.”

She described, following a planned power outage in October, having to “run through the gauntlet” with Hydro Ottawa to get clear answers about why the outage happened and if there were any more scheduled to happen.

She said she also received a power restoration notice email over a recent weekend when her family was away. But she hadn’t been informed that her power had gone out in the first place.

With the exception of a noted “communication lapse” in Orléans in early December, Hydro Ottawa did not indicate any further problems with its communication system.

“Hydro Ottawa provides advance notice for planned outages through multiple channels, including phone, email and text, or hardcopy letter for major projects, depending on customers’ notification preferences and contact information noted in their Hydro Ottawa MyAccount portal,” the spokesperson said.

Hydro Ottawa also acknowledged that planned outages can sometimes take place year-round “to prevent large-scale emergency failures.”

“When a planned outage is necessary during winter months — and the same goes for the summer — we monitor weather closely. If temperatures are forecasted to go beyond a specific safety threshold, the work is rescheduled if it can be.

“Planned outages are often necessary to safely conduct work on our grid to ensure it remains safe and reliable, ultimately preventing longer, unplanned outages in the future.”

Devine said he will work with residents who raise issues about the timing of planned outages. Most often, he said, Hydro Ottawa is able to reschedule the work to a more convenient date.

Many councillors also try to communicate outages on social media ahead of time and will dig into the reasons for unplanned outages when they happen, Devine said.

“There is a lot of maintenance work that has to happen in my ward,” he said. “I understand that people might be frustrated by planned outages. But if those planned outages are for necessary improvements, then I have to support those.”

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