A fire on the Queensborough Bridge did a lot more than leave ‘Boro residents in the dark last fall – it cost a lot of cash.
Queensborough residents lost power on Oct. 25, after a cable failure on a circuit on the bridge about 1 a.m. A subsequent fire damaged the adjacent circuits – leaving Queensborough without power.
Rod Carle, general manager of the New Westminster Electrical Utility, said the city has struggled to determine the cause of the fire. He said it appears it was caused by a combination of factors, including the age of the cables and the possibility that pebbles from the road fell onto cable, creating weak points and a fault on the cable.
“Typically, you could go in and actually cut a piece of that cable and send it back to the manufacturer and they could do a series of tests on those cables to try and identify what the fire was. But in this case, everything was burnt up so bad there is just no way that we could get it tested through a lab,” he said.
City crews restored power to Queensborough about 5 a.m. on Oct. 26. While one circuit failed, crews were able to re-energize two circuits, which was enough to provide power to Queensborough – at least temporarily.
“The load on Queensborough usually requires three feeders, but in the summertime or what we call non-peak or non-winter hours we can run the island with just two feeders so we were able to keep the power on and then go back in after and replace the cable, which had the second fault,” he said. “Our biggest concern was time of year and the weather was getting colder, and we weren’t sure how long we could actually run Queensborough with two feeders.”
Carle said the city was in “emergency mode” for a couple of weeks because it wasn’t sure how long power would stay on with only two feeders in operation.
According to a staff report, the initial costs incurred on the night of the fire was just over $65,000, which was mainly for labour costs related to having a team of powerline technicians on site for 28 hours at double time. He said the subsequent cost for replacing a cable over the next two weeks was just shy of $150,000.
“The Ministry of Highways, interestingly enough, would not allow us to work during the day so there is only a window of opportunity to work on the bridge, starting at 11 o’clock at night and going till 5 o’clock in the morning during the week and then 8 o’clock in the morning on weekends,” he said. “This certainly added some costs to try just to try and work around that. It made it difficult working in the dark most times.”
Staff estimate it will cost just over $350,000 to replace and repair all the conduits running alongside of the bridge and to pull in the two new feeder cables.
“Once the load in Queensborough gets a little lower when the weather gets a little warmer, we will be going up and looking at all the conduits, replacing and repairing anything that is damaged and then we are going to pull in two additional feeders to replace the ones that were spliced,” Carle said. “The costs are covered in the 2018 budget.”
While the electrical utility has a plan to build a new Queensborough substation between 2021 and 2013, Carle said the city’s short-term mitigation plan is to replace all of the three distribution feeder cables that go across the bridge.
“The mitigation strategy for this is over the next two to three years is having three brand new cables crossing the bridge. We believe that will hold us until we install a new substation over in Queensborough,” he said. “Based on our 25-year planning study, we were looking to have a transformer in place by 2021 to 2023.”
Mayor Jonathan Cote said the incident highlights the importance and need for an additional substation in Queensborough.
“I know this was obviously a difficult situation to deal with. We have a pretty good record here in the City of New Westminster when it comes to power outages so when any part of our city is out for as long as Queensborough was it certainly is quite disruptive,” he said. “A big thank you to all your crews, who worked so hard on the day of the incident to get power back up into Queensborough and repair things.”
