Not only does this tampering cut down on costs, it means that the hydro company doesn’t become suspicious of increased energy use – a telltale sign of possible illegal activity.

Daniele Gauvin, spokesperson with Hydro One, said the company now has an investigation team in place to track down energy thieves.

“Power theft is illegal and our Theft of Power Investigation Team looks for anomalies,” said Gauvin. “Thieves either manipulate the meter itself, to record the wrong information, or they bypass the meter altogether by connecting on the live feed before the meter.”

Hydro staff works closely with police, including Orillia OPP, to investigate suspicious activity. The company’s been called quite a few times to shut off power to houses containing suspected grow-op.

“Very often people who are stealing power are engaged in other illegal activities, for example, grow-ops.”

One way of tampering with a hydro meter was found online. It takes two magnets, one bigger than the other, some distilled water, an old a/c adaptor, electrical tape and a knife. Together, the items are used to slow the spinning of the meter’s dial.

A total of 5,472 Central Maine Power Co. customers were without power for about an hour at the peak of the outage, from 3:05 to 4:12 p.m., according to John Carroll, a CMP spokesman.

Some 3,500 customers were without power for a longer period, starting about 1:30 p.m. They didn’t have power back as of 5 p.m. Sunday and Carroll said then it would likely be a few more hours before power was restored to those customers.

The towns affected by the longer outage included: Belgrade, Chesterville, Fayette, Manchester, Mount Vernon, Readfield, Rome, and Vienna.

The larger outage affected those towns as well as customers in Augusta and Hallowell.

The initial outage was caused by a limb coming down on a power line in Readfield about 1:30 p.m., Carroll said.

While workers were reenergizing a substation in response to that outage, a piece of equipment in a substation failed which, in turn, caused another substation to go down, too, at 3:05 p.m.

With blackouts lasting as long as 18 hours in some areas, angry residents have taken to blocking streets with burning tires and stones in protest, and police have respondent with tear gas that have even hit homes.

Authorities blame the blackouts on maintenance problems while residents blame the electric companies and government for inefficiency.

”This is giving us a real beating,” said Samuel Abreu, who lives in East Santo Domingo.

The electric sector has always suffered from poor maintenance, internal inefficiencies and a lack of operating funds due to negligent bill collection and illegal tapping of electric lines.

But the oil crisis has aggravated the problem: Daily blackouts can now last between 12 to 18 hours, causing disruptions across the nation.

In Maimón, nestled in the hills of the central Cibao region, residents last month tried to burn down the electric company offices after 20 days of 18-hour outages. The province of Monseñor Nouel has been one of the hardest hit by the blackouts, which have unleashed myriad difficulties.

Food has spoiled, stores and workshops are paralyzed and nerves are raw from sleepless nights of suffocating heat and concern about thieves operating in the dark.

Adalgiza Almonte, who owns a small bar, complained that beers aren’t selling.

”Everything is warm, there’s never any electricity and people just aren’t buying,” said Almonte, 28.

Last month, residents of San Francisco de Macorís were terrorized by a gang of 20 youths who went about on scooters attacking everyone they encountered, grabbing cellphones and cash at gunpoint. The government sent in the army to restore order.

Rhadamés Segura, vice president of the governmental body that regulates the electric companies, insists that the blackouts are the result of maintenance problems and that the generators are supplying 85 percent of normal demand.

Most resorts and popular tourist destinations in places such as Punta Cana in the east coast and Puerto Plata in the north are not affected by the blackouts because they have their own generators or purchase energy from privately owned electric companies.

Blackout victims don’t believe government claims that 85 percent of demand is being supplied and suspect some of that energy is instead being sold to tourist establishments.

Meanwhile, the entire economy is suffering.

Schools, including the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo, have virtually ground to a halt. It costs more to fertilize farmlands and feed cattle. And small enterprises have no power and cannot function, while the bigger ones must provide their own power and thus watch their profits sucked up by the cost of generators.

While salaries are much lower than those in the States, the family food bill is approaching U.S. levels, gas sells for almost $6 a gallon and more people are forced to consider taking extra measures to ensure their security.

Martín Vásquez Reyes, who owns a welding shop in the small Cibao village of Sonador, has adapted his routine as best he can, working late at night when the lights are on and filling in at a nearby cattle farm.

Vásquez now cannot pay his employees, cover the higher cost of materials or pay the monthly electric bills of more than 1,000 pesos, about $30. And he has to feed a family of five.

They skip breakfast, save up for the all-important midday meal and eat a bit of bread and juice for supper.

UXBRIDGE — A lightning bolt strike to an Uxbridge power station Monday night is responsible for a lengthy hydro outage to almost 2,000 Hydro One customers in the township, according to the utility company’s spokeswoman.

Daniele Gauvin said sometime during a severe thunderstorm, during which heavy rain and hail pelted the town, lightning struck a power distribution station “on the outskirts of Uxbridge” which caused a transformer failure. Some residents of Uxbridge reported being without power for 12 hours, beginning 8:30 p.m. Monday.

More than 2,000 customers, most of them within Uxbridge township borders, were affected, said Ms. Gauvin. But by 11:30 a.m. Tuesday, a mobile transformer was brought in and power was back online to all customers in Uxbridge, explained Ms. Gauvin.

Uxbridge Fire Chief Scott Richardson said firefighters were called to a transformer fire at about 9:30 p.m. Monday, noting Hydro One crews were already on scene. At 4:30 p.m. the same day, the fire department responded to reports of trees down on Lakeridge Road, between Hwy. 47 and Davis Drive, said the chief. “Apparently trees blocked one lane,” he said.

Region road crews sprang into action Monday night and remained in clean-up mode Tuesday morning.

Jim Gorrill of Durham Region works was clearing debris from the side of Lakeridge Road, just south of Davis Drive, Tuesday morning. He said he and his two workmates had started the job of tossing wood debris into a chipper at 7:30 a.m. but a crew had already been out overnight to cut up damaged branches.

“We have our work cut out for us today, that’s for sure,” said Mr. Gorrill. “We’ll likely be out here all day.” He said some of the cut wood is left at the roadside, and is free to the public.

“We’ve got the bulk of people back on,” spokeswoman Marylena Stea said just before 6 p.m. She said a few customers in remote areas remain without power following Monday’s storm, but it was hoped that would change by about 8:15 p.m.

“In Picton everyone is back on,” said Stea. Earlier that afternoon under 40 customers had yet to have their power restored.

Fifteen customers in Tweed were still waiting for their service to be restored, Stea said, adding more in the area between Brockville and Vankleek Hill were in the same situation.

Hydro One’s Daniele Gauvin said approximately 21,000 Hydro One customers were without electricity late Monday night after dozens of hydro poles were uprooted or snapped and power lines felled by lighting and strong winds ranging from 90 to 100 km/h.

By Tuesday afternoon crews had restored power to all but about 3,500 in eastern Ontario.

Belleville fared much better despite a lightning strike on a power line at about 5:20 p.m. Monday.

George Armstrong, manager of regulatory affairs and key projects for Veridian Connections, said the outage was “relatively major” but short-lived.

“We experienced a lightning strike on a line just outside of the Belleville transformer station, which caused us to lose our supply from Hydro One on one feeder,” Armstrong said Tuesday. “It’s not uncommon in a lightning storm.

“That affected service to about 5,000 of our customers, and they were generally located north of Bridge Street and between Sidney Street and MacDonald Ave,” said Armstrong.

The power station is on Centre Street, just east of the Quinte Sports Centre on Cannifton Road.

Armstrong said power on that line was restored fully at 6:38 p.m. Monday.

“We had a few other isolated outages due to falling tree limbs,” he added.

Hydro-Quebec announced Tuesday it will spend $1.9 billion to overhaul the aging Gentilly-2 plant near Trois-Rivieres, Que.

It is hoped the extensive renovations will extend the power plant’s lifespan to 2040.

Hydro-Quebec described Gentilly-2 as a reliable and clean source of energy which helps stabilize Quebec’s power grid.

“We’ll go ahead with the renovation of Gentilly-2 because it’s a plant that has been used safely for 25 years,” the utility’s president, Thierry Vandal, told a news conference.

“The site of the plant is very safe, as much for production as for storing nuclear waste.”

Gentilly-2’s future has been the subject of heated debate for several years.

Environmental groups such as Greenpeace object to keeping the plant open because of what they see as murky long-term plans for dealing with radioactive waste.

“(The government) has had a policy that won’t accept a used-fuel waste site in Quebec,” said Greenpeace energy campaigner Shawn-Patrick Stensil.

“Today, however, they have given the OK to producing more radioactive waste. That’s hypocritical.”

Businesses and unions welcomed the refurbishment project as a much-needed boost for the central Quebec region.

The renovations will result in about $600 million in spinoffs for Quebec and will create about 800 jobs over a 20-month period, in addition to the station’s current staff.

Gentilly-2 came online in 1983 and produces about three per cent of the province’s total energy output. It is Quebec’s only nuclear plant and produces enough electricity to supply 270,000 homes a year.

Most of Hydro-Quebec’s electricity needs are met by hydroelectric power production.

Hydro-Quebec said refurbishing the generating station will begin with engineering and procurement this year, with construction to begin in 2011, with a return-to-service date of 2012.

The nuclear refurbishment in Quebec comes at a time of growth for Canada’s nuclear industry as governments expand their power grids with nuclear energy, avoiding polluting coal-fired plants.

In New Brunswick, NB Power is refurbishing the Point Lepreau nuclear plant to add another 25 years of operating life. The project will cost the utility about $430 million.

In Ontario, the province is expanding its nuclear network, already the most extensive in Canada, with new reactors to be built at the Darlington nuclear generating station east of Toronto by 2018.

The province has asked three companies - Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., Areva NP of France, and Westinghouse, a U.S.-Japanese joint venture - to submit bids to build the reactors by the end of the year.

In Alberta, the Bruce Power partnership, which already operates a nuclear plant in southwestern Ontario. is proposing to build a nuclear generating station in the Peace River region.

If the project is approved, it would be the first nuclear power station in Western Canada, a region of the country where hydroelectric, coal-fired and gas-fired stations produce most of the electricity.

Was replaced

Town Manager Stuart A. Hurd said an older tank, which FEMA recently said could be among hundreds potentially leaking around the country, was replaced with a new tank in 1991.

“There is very little concern of leak,” Hurd said. “The tank is tested annually or biannually.”

FEMA said last week that there are hundreds of underground fuel storage tanks across the country, located mostly at radio stations, that could be leaking.

The Cold War-era tanks were installed because the government wanted to ensure that radio stations could continue to run by generator in case of an attack by the former Soviet Union. Many of the tanks were built and installed in the 1960s, and store as much as 5,000 gallons of diesel fuel.

The underground tank at WBTN is a 2,000-gallon, double-hulled tank that is rarely used — only during power outages, said Hurd, who was able to obtain information about the existence and condition of the tank from the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation.

Neither Hurd, WBTN officials nor FEMA had any information about the tank last week. FEMA said it was in the process of looking into hundreds of tanks that came under its control years ago from the Federal Communications Commission.

It turns out, however, that FEMA no longer controls the WBTN tank, Hurd said. Southern Vermont College is the current owner, but it will soon be transferred to a nonprofit community group that is in the process of purchasing the station.

“The tank is apparently owned by SVC at the present time and ultimately will be owned by the Shires Media Partnership when the deal is finalized,” Hurd said. “It might have been under FEMA’s control at one time, but some time in the past it came under control of the radio station.”

FEMA said last week that leaking tanks could be located at eight radio stations in Vermont. The other stations located in Vermont that may have leaking tanks are WCFR, Springfield; WDEV, Waterbury; WIKE, Newport; WSTJ, St. Johnsbury; WSYB, Rutland; and WVMT, Colchester.

JOE KOHEN | The Associated Press
Five years ago, bystanders gathered in Times Square in Manhattan after a blackout in New York. The overall health and capacity of the nation’s transmission grid remain a problem.Five years after the worst blackout in North American history, the country’s largest utilities say the U.S. power system faces the prospect of even bigger and more damaging outages.

The specific flaws that led to 50 million people losing power in 2003 have largely been addressed, they say, but even bigger problems loom. Excess generating capacity in the system is shrinking, for example, and power-plant construction has slowed as costs to build and operate plants have soared.

At the same time, it is estimated that electricity use will increase 29 percent between 2006 to 2030 — much of it driven by residential growth, according to a government report issued in June.

“I’m really not a ‘Chicken Little’ player, but I worry that no one seems to be focusing in on this,” said Michael Morris, chairman, president and chief executive of American Electric Power, which runs the nation’s largest electricity transmission system.

Morris said massive outages this year in South Africa, which forced gold, diamond and platinum mines to stop production for five days, should serve as a warning to the United States.

Industry experts back Morris and say there is even more resistance to building new plants because of the debate over climate change and opposition to new transmission lines. The blocking of two coal-fired plants in Kansas is one example of the resistance.

“The level of excess capacity has shrunk … to a level barely within the planning toleration of the industry,” said Marc Chupka, with the Brattle Group, an energy consultant.

The blackout five years ago today shut off power to vast swaths of the Northeast and Midwest for as much as four days. Rolling blackouts continued in Ontario for a week. The outages caused as much as $10 billion in damages to the U.S. economy.

FirstEnergy Corp. of Akron, Ohio, which got the blame for the spread of the outages, has worked to shore up its transmission system. But the larger issues of the country’s total generating ability and the overall health and capacity of the transmission grid remain a problem, the experts say.

Rick Sergel, president of the North American Electric Reliability Corp., the agency that oversees the nation’s power grid, said, “We’re to the point where we need every possible resource: renewables, demand response and energy efficiency, nuclear, clean coal — you name it, we need it. And we especially need the transmission lines that will bring the power generated by these new resources to consumers.”

Construction of coal-fired generating plants has almost stopped, and new nuclear plants are years away, if they are approved at all, said Arshad Mansoor, vice president of power delivery and use for the Electric Power Research Institute. Better efficiency will go only so far, he said.

Morris, of American Electric Power, sees a potentially dire situation ahead, including the sort of power rationing that occurred in South Africa.

No patients were in any danger, but the fuel spilled into a nearby pond.

Fire crews worried about the area where the fuel spilled. It’s where the Children’s Hospital drains empty out, and it is a natural area and retention pond.

Crews put white tubing in the water trying to catch the diesel before it hurt the wildlife. The first concern was the Children’s Hospital clinic building where diesel gushed on the roof.

The fuel came from a tank that supplies a back-up power generator. A pump in the system malfunctioned. Crews realized that the diesel would drain off the roof through a sewer system and into the natural area. It’s close to the Menomonee River.

“This is a part of the Menomonee in a sense that is still undeveloped and used for biking trails and public recreation,” Dep. Chief Scott Erke from the Wauwatosa Fire Department said.

Haz mat teams moved in with tubes. They absorb the diesel. Fire crews estimate that the vast majority of the fuel was contained before it hurt the environment.

“We want to obviously protect the wildlife and any other situations within the Menomonee and where the Menomonee might flow,” Erke said.

TODAY’S TMJ4’s Mick Trevey talked to the Sierra Club. They’re glad crews stopped the diesel flow before there was a health concern.

“Environmental toxins that get into our waterways eventually work their way into Lake Michigan, and that’s where our drinking water comes from,” Rosemary Wehnes from the Sierra Club said.