Why did it take 12 days to restore power to seniors and others vulnerable on P.E.I.

By the start of the day on Wednesday, Oct. 5 — 12 days into the massive outage on Prince Edward Island which at one point had knocked out electricity to the entire province — Maritime Electric had reduced its number of outages from 82,000 down to about 9,000.

Yet it was only on day 12 that the last long-term and community care facilities and government-owned senior's housing complexes in P.E.I. were brought back online, according to the province.

P.E.I.'s Emergency Measures Organization said those seniors' homes and care facilities are among the roughly 1,600 locations on the province's critical infrastructure list, meaning they're considered a priority when it comes to restoring power in the wake of outages like the one left by post-tropical storm Fiona.

Tanya Mullally, the director responsible for the provincial EMO, said that list can't be shared for privacy reasons, but that it also includes gas stations, fire departments, health-care facilities and buildings designated as municipal reception centres in the event of a power outage. 

Questions are being raised as to why it took almost two weeks in some cases to restore power to some of the Island's most vulnerable residents, leaving seniors to wander through darkened corridors of government-owned apartment buildings, with neither light nor heat, and causing slips and falls among care home residents, some of whom had to be sent to hospital.

"We should have had power back in every single seniors' complex … forget day 12, that should have been done on day 2, day 3," said Peter Bevan-Baker, P.E.I.'s Official Opposition leader.

Mullally said EMO has been working on its prioritization list, in consultation with Maritime Electric, for the past six months.

"They have all the civic addresses of all of these sites that we have indicated should be priority first," Mullally said.

She said EMO is involved in discussions with the utility "almost on a daily basis" around those priorities, but ultimately the company has the freedom to decide where its resources would be best applied in restoring power.

"It's a partnership," said Mullally. "We don't tell them that seniors' homes or any of those are not important. What we're saying is that we need to do this together and decide today what, where do we direct our resources."

"We defer [to] them to make that assessment and tell us what's possible."

In a media briefing on Oct. 3 , Kim Griffin, spokesperson for Maritime Electric, said once the utility ascertained that the province's electrical connections to the mainland were okay, "the other thing that we really focused on were the issues around fuel and grocery and restaurants."

In some cases, Griffin said restoring power to seniors' facilities required "a complete rebuild" of the province's power distribution network in areas where lots of trees came down.

"For example in Charlottetown, around Belvedere for example, that was a complete rebuild. So it's not like we don't have them on the priority list, we absolutely do."