The pre-Christmas storm that roared though Michigan continued to spew ice as it continued on its path to Toronto. So how are that city’s residents faring compared to us?
One similarity is that both cities have mayors some call “colorful” (or worse), though hard-drinking, crack-smoking Mayor Rob Ford may be the only municipal leader who can make Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero look sedate in comparison.
Both mayors also refused to declare a state of emergency. The Toronto Star castigated Mayor Ford for not doing so and accused him of not wanting to share the spotlight in advance of the upcoming election.
Yet city officials and power company officials claim this is the worst ice storm in memory. Toronto was hit with 30mm of ice (1 3/16 inches according to this converter) that took down a third of the power grid for the city. I have yet to find an accounting of the thickness of the ice that coated mid-Michigan, but BWL says 40% of its system went offline.
Both power companies suffered record numbers of outages. According to an article in the Toronto Star on Sunday, Dec. 29, Toronto Hydro had reduced the 300,000 customers without power to 6,000 and expected all to be restored soon. Many of the warming centers were closing, as usage numbers dropped from a high of about 1,000 people using the eight centers to slightly more than 100. However, the power company said they would remain at the highest level of emergency until all were back online.
The storm is expected to cost the city an estimated $8 to $10 million. No estimate yet for Lansing, though some wonder whether BWL was able to make money selling its excess power during the outage, which might actually have generated additional revenue for the company.
There is a free lunch
The province of Ontario set up a program to hand out $100 gift cards at locations around the Toronto for people who had lost food as a result of the outage.
According to the Toronto Globe and Mail, roughly $160,000 of the $460,000 allocated to the program has been spent so far, but demand was greater than anticipated and some areas ran out before all people had been served. (My friend Sharon, who lives in Toronto, said that at one location, a wealthy person began handing out $100 to people on his own.
The Toronto card program is jointly funded by the government and food retailers. Maybe Hank and Doug Meijer (net worth $4.9 billion) would be willing to kick in here?
Initial response
The Globe and Mail reported that Toronto Hydro’s call center was initially overwhelmed, as the normal rate of 3,000 to 4,000 calls a day swelled to 138,000. However, comments at the bottom of the article suggested residents were impressed overall with the power company and city’s response. One person noted that warming centers were opened and stocked with food before the storm had ended.
The National Post broke the mold by writing that residents were frustrated with the pace of repairs six days into the crisis. However, the comments at the bottom of the article seem mild. One issue raised in both cities is whether power lines should be buried underground.
The CBC website ran a picture of Toronto Hydro CEO Anthony Haines in a hoodie and hardhat without triggering the scorn expressed by a Lansing resident who balked at seeing BWL General Manager J. Peter Lark in a hardhat. Comments suggested that people believed Haines was sincere when he talked with emotion about the work his crews were doing.
First impressions suggest Toronto residents do not appear to be suffering the same lever of anguish and frustration exhibited by Lansing residents at last night’s special session of Lansing City Council. Part of that difference may be attributed to Canadians’ renowned politeness no matter how much you throw at them. However, it also appears that Toronto had excellent emergency plans in place and executed them well despite having a mayor with a penchant for smoking crack and literally throwing his weight around.
A taste for public policy
Another article discussing the issue of tree trimming as it relates to power outages underscores how differently Canadians approach municipal problem-solving. The Canadian article is replete with statistics about the city’s trees, and it contains a sophisticated discussion of the virtues of different kinds of trees and strategies to deal with ailing trees. The underlying assumption is that an educated populace is eager to delve into wonkish public policy discussions.
Unlike our Tea Party/militia folk, Toronto residents apparently want and expect government to work. They also appear willing to be taxed for services such as major studies of the cities trees. (“Overall, 81 per cent of Toronto’s tree population was in good condition in 2012, but only 49 per cent of city-owned street trees met this mark, the city’s forest-management plan noted.” Is there a similar tree study in Lansing?)
Run an article like that in the Lansing State Journal, and you would have to beat off the trolls commenting about how such studies are a waste of tax dollars. Toronto also seems poised to initiate a tree-planting program to replace their aging tree stock. I can only imagine what it would take to make that happen here.
excellent article. Montreal got hit with a far more severe ice storm back in ’98 and it seems it was far more effectively dealt
Thank you for the great comparison. Your final paragraph is spot on about how the difference in community attitude plays into this. Once upon a time however, Lansing did have a program that surveyed the trees, kept a balance of varieties, removed dead or dying trees and replanted where needed. Our current budget does not allow for that any more.
We didn’t even notice what we had until it was gone.
The City of Lansing continues to have a Forestry Division. It is in the Public Service Department. The City of Lansing decision-making, budgeting, management, politics and decisions to place tax increase proposals on the ballot for City of Lansing voters (who overwhelmingly vote Democrat) is done by Democrat/folk. As Mayor Bernero points out, he received 70% of the vote in the last election and there was an identical number of votes in favor of the medical marijuhana ordinance at that time. That is another indication that Tea Party/militia is not a factor in the budgetary and other values in Lansing City Hall anything to do with trees.
My contention is that it is the Tea Party folks who have pulled the agenda so far to the right with their anti-government rhetoric that it is becoming impossible to claw back enough money from the plutocrats to have a functioning government anymore.
it is more than the tea party, as you said, it is a larger insane fear of govt and taxes. but i would want to know if lansing’s dysfunctional response to this storm compares better or worse than that of other u.s. cities. for instance, maine got hit hard as well. michigan and maine are northern states, with deep histories of dealing with winter’s stresses. who did better or worse? having lived through this consumers energy and bwl debacle, it is hard to believe that we did what we should have done, even if this was an unusually rough icestorm. living here i expect the city not to be incapacitated by winter, as it is, say, in washington d.c.