Progress is flowing, slowly, on frozen pipes

The coldest month in Toronto history created a situation in which clearly communicated information about two weeks without water seems like an improvement.


Thestar.com
March 4, 2015
By Edward Keenan

Here’s the bad news: after the city fell back into a deep freeze overnight following its first day above freezing in more than a month, Toronto Water expects about 150 people out there to wake up to find they have suddenly have no water service due to frozen pipes. If you’re one of them, you’re looking at a possible 15 days before your pipes will be thawed.

So: if you woke up this morning and you still have water, go to your basement and turn on a tap to a thin trickle to prevent freezing. Leave it on until the spring thaw finally arrives.

The sorry prognosis for those without water - up to two weeks without the means to drink, wash, bathe, or flush - was delivered by Toronto Water general manager Lou Di Gironimo at a press conference alongside Mayor John Tory and Toronto Hydro officials Wednesday afternoon. Given the current wait list, it now takes about five days for an assessment crew to arrive after a no-water call, after that, if a household is placed on the excavation-and-thaw list, the wait is a further seven to 10 days.

The good news is, Toronto Water has been improving their response. Last week, I reported that in addition to staggering wait times, residents faced an impenetrable wall of miscommunication, lack of information, missed appointments, and general confusion that left them instructed to stay at home waiting for crews that never arrived for a week or more. Immediately after that report, Tory and Di Gironimo announced the implementation of so-called SWAT teams to streamline communications and track progress.

Over the weekend, I continued to receive reports from multiple residents of unexplained missed appointments and clueless (but friendly) customer service representatives. Di Gironimo says that after Monday, as the SWAT team crew grew from six to 75 people, things improved. He says they have now streamlined the system to ensure people begin speaking to operators who have information handy and access to road crew communications and schedules.

They have an outbound call centre to arrange specific schedules and manage triage. They have merged the assessment crews with the “highline” installation crews who attempt a temporary fix by tapping into a neighbour’s water supply, so both now arrive at the same time (that’s the crew that arrives after five days).

Even as I was writing this, Denise Teixeira, who I profiled a week ago as she and her husband waited in frustration, called to say she is expecting a thaw crew and a backup highline crew on Thursday (12 days after they first called to report frozen pipes), and that the person she’d spoken to in scheduling seemed to be in command of information and gave her clear steps for followup. “It seems like that’s some improvement,” she said. “Some hope.”

The coldest month in Toronto history has created a situation in which clearly communicated information about two weeks without water seems like an improvement. It still stinks. (Sometimes literally: Texiera said she took her son to a play date the other day and asked the other mother if she could use the shower. You need to get creative.)

“We’re learning lessons as we go,” Tory told me after the press conference. He says that by the end of the year, Toronto Water will have a website where people will be able to log in and track the progress of their own file - something it’s hard to believe doesn’t already exist.

As he said, the frozen pipes and the blackouts Hydro was dealing with this week are the result of “extreme weather events beyond the city authorities’ control.” Those extreme weather events, he noted, are happening more frequently, and we need to be prepared for them.

At the same press conference, Hydro manager Anthony Haines spoke of efforts to “climate change-proof” the system, buying hardier equipment that can more easily withstand extreme weather, and he spoke of the lessons already learned and implemented in the recent blackout after the struggles of the ice storm of late 2013.

For the city in general, a big part of climate change-proofing should involve applying these lessons about communications and case management-from hydro, from water, and from others-to all situations. We shouldn’t have to build the boat all over again every time we need to sail it.

We’ll need to wait until the next extreme weather event to see if the lessons stick.

In the meantime, leave a tap running in the basement.