A Burlington Hydro official said staff responded well to calls and there were no lengthy outages from the storm, which hit areas of the city shortly after 1 p.m.

“It was a pretty intense storm for a brief time and we had a number of small issues,” said Joe Saunders, director of operations. “A lot of staff got out and everything was restored.”

He said the largest outages occurred when the thunderstorm caused two power feeder breakers to lock out at 1:33 p.m. In each case, power was restored a few minutes later.

One outage affected 709 customers in the King Road and North Service Road area and the western boundary of Aldershot.

In a second outage, 1,036 customers briefly lost power in the Brant Hills area, on the western portion of Cavendish Drive and the Upper Middle Road area, west of Brant Street.

Saunders said several smaller incidents occurred, affecting about 10-15 customers each.

There were six reports of trees and 13 calls about branches falling on wires.

The longest outages occurred when hydro poles broke during the storm.

Saunders said power was off for nearly five hours in the area near 350 Malvern Rd. and about three hours near 506 Picton Place.

Power was off for about 4 1/2 hours near 5116 Cedar Springs Rd. when a vehicle hit a hydro pole about 9:30 a.m.

“I was on a winning streak — not as good as other people, but I was actually making some money,” said the Saskatoon resident on Monday afternoon. “They took everyone’s name and phone number and their club card if they had one and when the power comes back on, they’re going to cash everyone’s ticket in and you just have to go back and collect your ticket. The machines will be up and running about two hours after the power goes on.”

She was disappointed she had to leave her winning machine but the power outage didn’t dim her enthusiasm for the game of chance.

“I’ll be back tonight — we’ve got to get our tickets and cash them in and keep playing,” said McAuley as she sat on a curb outside the casino.

The lights went out at 1:13 p.m. for 35,000 Regina customers in areas that included downtown and industrial customers, said SaskPower spokesman Larry Christie.

“The power came up twice,” he said. “By two o’clock, since the transmission line didn’t appear to be responding to our attempts to reactivate it, they decided to switch to other substations. That process took about 20 minutes and they almost had it complete when patrols discovered the problem. The power line that was affected runs from the switching station near SIAST under Regina and ends up at the jail and goes in to the Fleet Street sub. Then it leaves that substation and runs all the way along the perimeter of Regina to Condie, which is out by Flowing Springs.”

SaskPower patrols found a transmission structure on the Condie portion had been hit by lightning.

“They went around the structure using other power lines and they’re making plans to repair it now,” he said. “What happened then was that the process reversed itself and they had to switch all of the customers back to the Fleet Street sub.”

Power was restored by 3 p.m., Christie said.

A power outage in a predominately cashless society is a jolt to businesses, said Kelly Hague, owner of Loggie’s Shoes,.

“We can’t process Visa, Mastercard or debit cards so if customers come in, apart from not being able to see very well in the store, if they had cash we could hand write a bill but not many people carry cash so effectively it shuts us down,” Hague said. “It’s not good but thankfully it doesn’t happen very often.”

Monday’s power loss had Dustin Gero, manager/owner of the Pita Pit considering the purchase of a back-up generator. In a prolonged power outage, he estimates he could lose thousands of dollars of frozen inventory in the store’s cooler.

“The power went out just after our lunch rush so it didn’t affect us too much — some people did leave because they didn’t want a cold pita,” Gero said. “We already lose sales because of road closures downtown … Every day we lose, every hour we lose, it just keeps adding up. The loss of power doesn’t help.”

Kelly Snowden, an employee of the Public Employees Benefits Agency, didn’t let the power outage halt her work. She took the stairs down from the 12th floor of the Conexus Plaza on Hamilton Street and sat in front of the building and worked on a laptop.

“I walked down because I’ve been stuck in an elevator before,” she said. “As long as you’re going down 12 flights of stairs it’s not that bad. I have a meeting tomorrow and I just want to make sure that I have a document in order for that client so I’m just going over it. And I thought I’d check to see if our new laptops automatically hook up to wireless. We just got these three weeks ago so I thought today was as good as any to check it.”

Although some natural light streamed through the windows of her office, that didn’t help where she was during the blackout.

“We were in one of the boardrooms when the power went out and it was pretty dark in there,” Snowden said.

Sitting in his hot and muggy Hamilton Street store, tailor Victor Silva looked mournfully at the full racks of clothes waiting to be altered and his silent sewing machine.

“I can do nothing, absolutely nothing,” Silva said. “Last summer (the power) was out for a little while but it only lasted for 15 to 20 minutes.”

Time is money in his business.

“We had some thunderstorms roll through the area late in the afternoon,” Teri MacBride, regional community relations director, PPL Corp., said Friday afternoon.

However, the blackout that left Knoebels Amusement Resort in the dark around 9 p.m., momentarily stranding some visitors on the Skyway ride, could have been caused by, of all things, a squirrel.

“A squirrel got into an area that it shouldn’t have,” MacBride said, noting that workers discovered the carcass. She couldn’t say with any certainty on what, if anything, the squirrel had nibbled.

“We don’t really know,” what precisely caused the power failure, she continued, saying that she wasn’t sure, exactly, how far the outage stretched. Knoebels Campground, as well as J&D Campground, just north of Route 487, were affected.

It didn’t take long for PPL crews to respond, though, according to MacBride. There were trucks in the area working on aftereffects of the storms at the time of the blackout. She didn’t have an exact time, but MacBride said the teams responded minutes after getting the call.

“(Crews) switched some routings and were able to bypass the problem,” she said.

During the outage, Knoebels maintenance workers were able to set up spotlights with emergency generators and use gasoline engines to rescue the Skyway riders with no trouble at all, according to co-manager Buddy Knoebel.

Within a half-hour of the first call, area fire crews had responded, setting up lights in the parking lot to assist guests as they exited the amusement park.

“It was raining cats and dogs, and maybe a cow or two,” Rumford Police Dispatcher Tracy Higley said after a downpour in the western mountain town. Heavy rain was also reported in Paris and other towns and there were numerous reports of wind and lightning damage, the National Weather Service said.

A funnel cloud was reported in Bridgton, where trees were uprooted by high winds. Kirk Apffel of the weather service office in Gray said a team will be sent to the site Friday to inspect the damage and determine whether a tornado had hit the area.

Central Maine Power Co. reported more than 3,000 outages late Thursday afternoon affecting customers from York County in the south to Dover-Foxcroft in Piscataquis County.

“What we’re getting now is widely scattered, but we’re keeping an eye on it pretty closely,” said CMP spokeswoman Gail Rice.

The weather service said thunderstorms across much of Maine could produce up to 2 or 3 inches of rain in some areas, large hail and damaging winds that could reach 70 mph. Flood and tornado watches were in effect in most of Maine excluding Down East.

Earlier in the day, power was restored to most of Bangor Hydro-Electric’s service area after eastern Maine was left in the dark due to suspected lightning strikes, but wind from the second wave of storms was causing hundreds of new outages by late afternoon.

More than 118,000 customers lost their electricity shortly before 8 a.m., said Bangor Hydro spokeswoman Susan Faloon, but nearly everyone had service back by late morning. With the second blast later in the day, 224 outages in scattered areas were reported, Faloon said.

Bangor Hydro’s service area covers Penobscot County, including the state’s third-largest city, Bangor, along with most of Hancock and Washington counties and part of Piscataquis County. At the height of the morning systemwide blackout, the only area that was spared of outages was small section of Eastport that was powered off a small generator.

“Street lights, traffic lights, you name it,” said Faloon.

Faloon said the outage was believed to have been caused by a pair of lightning strikes, but said it could be several days before the exact cause is known. The earlier storms brought 2 inches of rain to parts of the state, the weather service said.

Faloon said the utility was able to restore service to its coverage area quickly due to ther benefit of revised procedures and technical improvements following ice storms a decade ago that wrecked much of the state’s power distribution system. Bangor Hydro had restored service to most of its customers by about 10:30 a.m., well ahead of noon when it initially anticipated it would get everyone back up.

“The fact that we were able to go from nearly every customer except a few in Eastport from having no power back to having power in a couple of hours I think is pretty amazing,” Faloon said.

While the Bangor Hydro service interruption was at its worst, Gov. John Baldacci issued a statement urging the region’s residents to remain calm.

The Stanton Brothers dairy farm, which has 750 cows, is building the system to turn tonnes of cow dung, normally spread on fields for stinky fertilizer, into methane gas that can be burnt in a converted diesel generator to create electricity.

“It’s the largest on-farm digester in the country,” explains energy consultant Garry Fortune who is helping create the system.

“We’re running material through it in the test phase now, we’re actually producing the byproducts from it.”

Besides methane gas, these byproducts include a nutrient rich effluent that can be used as fertilizer and a peat moss-like fibrous material that will be used as bedding for the cattle. Any surplus will be sold as a peat moss alternative.

A slurry of manure will be piped from the barn to eight three-story “digesters” where it will be fermented by bacteria that break it down. Letting the “bugs” break it down also kills pathogens in the manure and eliminates the odor.

“It’s like a brewery,” said Fortune.

But instead of getting drunk, consumers will get heat and light, up to 1.3 megawatts worth through a deal with the province that will see electricity from the system sold to the Ontario power grid.

That is one reason the province is putting $5 million into the project. Another is to help divert that cow waste — and other off-farm organic waste that will be added into the mix — from going to the landfill.

“We believe it is a more responsible way to deal with on-farm waste,” said Fortune.

The converted diesel generators that will burn the gas will also be cogeneration systems, meaning heat created in the combustion process can be caught and used to heat the facility as well as the digesters that need to be kept at 37 degrees Celsius.

The system requires a balancing act of the right ingredients and the right heat.

“What’s key here is getting your recipe right,” explained Fortune.

“In essence this is like a big giant stomach, you gotta make sure you don’t upset the stomach.”

While the engineering experts refused to draw direct links between the needs and a pair of recent incidents which struck two of the country’s largest cities, they warned that time was running out for many steel towers, electric polls, wires, transformers, and facilities.

“You’re now looking at 50 years (old) infrastructure that is in need of replacement,” said Jatin Nathwani, the executive director of Waterloo University’s Institute for Sustainable Energy. “These things may last 20 years, (or) they may only last two. You don’t know, so there’s a large unknown and uncertain gap growing in terms of understanding the integrity of that infrastructure.”

Over the weekend, an explosion struck a transformer under a 22-storey highrise and rocked a Toronto neighbourhood, forcing the evacuation of some 900 residents. The incident follows an electrical fire which struck underground cables, causing recent blackouts in Vancouver.

Public officials are still investigating in both cities to determine the cause of the incidents.

Nathwani, a consultant at Hydro One who has worked in the industry for 30 years, said that the Ontario utility company has 1.2 million distribution polls across the province. While it can test 5,000 to 10,000 in a given year, he said there are 50,000 that reach their 50th birthday from one year to the next.

He said there are similar challenges for other pieces of the infrastructure that make it a challenge to assess the vulnerabilities, despite new investments as well as sophisticated testing and monitoring systems that are already in place.

“You can gather the data, you can do the best assessments, you can feed in all your monitoring information to get at the best estimate of replacement time for these assets, but one can never actually predict when a component will actually fail,” said Nathwani.

“It’s just like the equivalent of (getting) all your monitoring tests done, you go to the doctors, you have your visits, but no one can actually predict when you will die.”

The industry association which represents utility companies across the country has estimated they will need $80 billion in investments for nuclear energy infrastructure and another $40 to $50 billion for hydroelectric sites over the next 10 to 20 years, to ensure long-term stability in the supply.

But those estimates do not include investments that may be required in new renewable forms of energy such as wind and solar power.

“Time is not our friend on this. We need to have more electricity in just about every region of the country,” said Pierre Guimond, president of the Canadian Electricity Association.

“Demand is racing ahead of supply and the supply that we have requires refurbishment and major investment to carry on for another 50 to 80 years.”

Guimond said new neighbourhoods are increasing demand and the need for new costly infrastructure and transmission lines underground. He said other needs such as the potential emergence of electric cars also will require careful planning and development to supply more power on existing grids.

The 900 residents from the 21-storey highrise were evacuated after an underground hydro vault exploded below their building Sunday.

Investigators remained on the scene Monday to determine when the building will be “structurally sound” for residents to return to pick up their belongings, according to Bill Hiscott, one of the two OFM supervisors onsite.

He said it will take the next couple of hours before this determination can be made.

Many of the homeless residents spent overnight in an emergency centre set up at a nearby elementary school in the Victoria Park and Danforth Avenues neighbourhood.

The underground vault burst into flames around 10:30 a.m. Sunday, injuring 10 people - including nine Toronto firefighters. Three of the firefighters suffered second-degree burns, three had possible concussions and three had to be treated for smoke inhalation.

All have been released from the hospital.

A civilian was also treated for smoke inhalation.

Hiscott said that it’s still too early to tell what may have caused the explosion.

“We haven’t been able to get in there to look yet,” he said. “We have substantial damage here.”

Fire crews had initially arrived at the underground hydro vault to investigate reports of smoke.

During the investigation, the vault bust into flames sending a fireball “as high as a tree outside,” according to Toronto Fire Capt. Mike Strapko. The impact of the explosion was so strong that it moved and burned some nearby parked cars and lifted a fire pumper off the ground, he added.

For several hours, fire officials asked the residents living on the higher floors to remain inside their units because “there was too much smoke contamination” following the explosion to leave.

No injuries have been reported.

State and local officials say the storms ripped up trees and power lines early Monday and ripped the roof off a building at the state prison for women in Mitchellville.

The utilities MidAmerican Energy and Alliant Energy say more than 200,000 of their customers have been blacked out.