Surprise power outage hits downtown Hamilton

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As many as 2700 Horizon Utilities customers may have woken up to blinking clocks and warm bedrooms this morning after a surprise power outage overnight.

Just before 9 pm last night, the electricity distributor announced it needed to shut off the power to an area south of Barton to the mountain, between Caroline & Wentworth streets.

The reason given was emergency work to place additional transformer capacity into service to meet increased demand caused by the hot weather this week.

Two outages, at 1 am and 4 am were supposed to last about an hour, but just before 4 am CHCH learned that problems had been encountered, and the power might not be back on until 6 am.  Power was actually restored about 4:45 am.

Horizon Utilities apologized for the short notice of the outage, saying the work needed to be done to avoid the potential of rolling blackouts as a result of system overload.

Power was also out in parts of Toronto last evening, but those outages were unplanned.