BC Hydro crews are being praised for their tireless response to the brutal windstorm in Metro Vancouver over the weekend, but the Crown corporation admits it still dropped the ball providing information to the public.
An estimated 500,000 people were left without power after gusting winds started walloping the South Coast on Saturday, downing about 500 trees onto homes, cars and power lines in the City of Vancouver alone.
Hundreds of BC Hydro workers were tasked with restoring service, but the problem was made worse when the company’s website – a vital tool providing up-to-date outage information and estimated repair times – suddenly went offline early Saturday afternoon.
BC Hydro CEO Jessica McDonald said the cause of the website failure, which lasted until Monday morning, is still unknown, but it’s under investigation.
“We will get to the root of the problem,” McDonald said. “It was a real surprise that it went down, it was an even bigger surprise that it was down for so long.”
McDonald said there were meetings all weekend trying to get the website back up. In the end, a less functional alternative site was launched and BC Hydro doubled its normal social media efforts, pushing out what information it could online.
The result was still less than satisfactory, however, and many customers said they were frustrated at unanswered questions and a lack of available details.
“It wasn’t enough information,” McDonald admitted. “Often times the most important thing is just to know and understand what’s happening, what’s expected and to be able to follow along, and with our website down we weren’t able to provide that experience.”
Adrian Dix, NPD critic for BC Hydro, said the failure is especially galling given how much money has been pumped into the corporation’s Information Technology and Telecommunications plan in recent years.
“They’ve gone over budget on significant projects and they’ve spent literally hundreds of millions of dollars of ratepayers money to fix these problems,” Dix said.
“Obviously the website gets used more in an emergency than any other time, but for it to have gone down for two days while power was off for hundreds of thousands of people in Metro Vancouver isn’t good enough.”
Experts said BC Hydro’s social media response was also lacking, noting that hundreds of Facebook comments went unanswered until early Monday morning.
Dave Teixeira of Dave.ca Communications said the response on Twitter was similarly disappointing.
“For the first 20 hours or 22 hours, they had only responded to two tweets directly,” Teixeira said.
McDonald promised BC Hydro will get to the bottom of what happened to the website and either ensure it can’t happen again, or that there will be a better contingency plan in place next time.
Until the cause is confirmed, the CEO said she would prefer not to speculate.
“I don’t want to get ahead of trying to understand what happened with the website. We need that very specific information. We don’t know what end that happened on, we don’t know what triggered it and we don’t know what the fix will be,” McDonald said.
With a report from CTV Vancouver’s Lisa Rossington
