Peak demand

It couldn't last, of course.  For the first two weeks after the ice storm, the media were full of stories about how power company workers were giving up their Christmas break to get the lights and heat working again, how people were coming in from other provinces to help, and so on.  All of which was true.  But now, with the power back on (and the January thaw underway), the second guessing has begun.

Over at the National Post, dear old Conrad ('Lord") Black, who apparently lost power at his own mansion for a couple of days, has a bad word to say for just about everyone. The Toronto Star, meanwhile, is careful not to dis the front-line workers, but quotes four unnamed Toronto Hydro employees as saying that the company's communications systems, both between the company and its customers and between its operations centre and the line crews, buckled under the strain imposed by the storm.

Well, why wouldn't they?  As even sober weather experts are admitting, this may have been the worst ice storm in the region's recorded history.  A third of the city was without power, so the number of calls, and the number of places that needed fixing, and the number of crews out fixing them, were all unprecedented.  No business can put in place enough spare capacity to be able to handle such an event without experiencing some problems and delays.

It's like the subway at rush hour.  People don't like the fact that they can't get a seat, but unless the train has tipped over into PIXC mode (that's rail-speak for "Passengers In eXcess of Capacity" -- see, you can learn something here), they mostly understand why. If the operator provided enough capacity to give everyone a seat at rush hour, then most of the trains would be almost empty 20 hours a day.  That would be expensive, so fares would go up, and passengers would like that even less than strap-hanging.

Similarly, if Toronto Hydro provided enough communications capacity to be able to handle 100 times the normal call volume -- which is what they experienced at the height of the storm -- they'd incur massive ongoing costs for equipment and staff that might only be used a couple of times in a century.  The Lord knows there are enough (justified) complaints about electricity costs in Ontario as it is, without piling on all that overhead.

That's not to say there are no lessons to be learned, and the utility's bosses have promised to learn them.  But it's infuriating to find the Star, in particular, piling in on this one, when they can't even deliver the daily paper to my front door reliably any more.