err – Power Fire…

Fire broke out in an under-sidewalk transformer vault this afternoon.

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Transformer vault fire one block away from one of our data-centers today in Toronto… I was particularily antsy about it as we lease our dark fiber from Toronto Hydro Telecom, and we’d had an exended outage due to vault-fire in the past.

Foam bubbling up from the vault

Apparently the method for extinguishing a transformer vault fire is to fill the vault with water, and then top it off with foam. Primarily it’s cooling oil burning.

Removing the water

Looking North on Yonge Street towards Queen, no power…

Power was out from Victoria to Bay, Queen to King and Adelaide. Queen subway station was closed, as was the PATH and south part of the Eaton Center.

I returned to the scene as I was heading for home…

Burnt/Melted transformer wrapped for scrap

Unfortunately there’s not much exciting to see; as there’s a lot of asbestos in use, they take the clean-up process very seriously. Sadly this is why I couldn’t get in for any closer photos or of the vault itself.

This man-hole is across the street from the vault…

It’s hard to see, but the bottom two rungs are under water. Click for larger limage.

This is how things looked when I left at 23:30, you can see the new transformer in front of the crane, and they’re loaded asbestos-contaminated detrius into yellow bags.

The maintenance foreman estimated another 12 hours until service is fully restored. They’ll be cleaning up for several hours, then pumping out more water. Afterwards, the construction crew will install the new tranformer, at which point the cabling & jointers will re-run the damaged cables and finally the electricians will reconnect the transformer and get the rest of the lights back on.