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Media punching bags and RIM co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis confirmed in a 10 a.m. conference call that full, global BlackBerry service was restored early this morning, ending the three-day blackout. The company’s larger problems, however, are another story.
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BlackBerry blackout resolved, RIM’s Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis say they’re really sorry
Toronto Hydro looking for people to drive electric Smart Cars
They’re not exactly in the spirit of Rob Ford’s city, but nobody can deny that Smart Cars are popular in downtown Toronto. The huggable little cars are about to get even more eco-friendly as Toronto Hydro and Mercedes-Benz bring a pilot electric car project to the city. The goal is, in part, to get some hint of whether Toronto’s greybeard of a power grid can handle the demand that electric cars will bring.
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Priority One: suicides on the subway tracks—how many, how often and how to stop them
In the first five months of this year, 17 people jumped into the path of oncoming subway trains. A scheme to outfit stations with safety barriers is low on the TTC’s to-do list, leaving us with the ugly problem of how to stop suicides now
After his train ran over David Dewees, Kevin Pett took six months’ leave and underwent therapy. “A lot of drivers get angry after they’ve had a suicide,” he says. “I just shut down” (Image: Sandy Nicholson)
On Saturday October 3, 2009, at about eight o’clock in the morning, Kevin Pett, a subway operator, was on his usual Bloor-Danforth route, driving his train eastbound into High Park station. Pett, who is 38, solidly built and soft-spoken, had been working for the TTC for 12 years. On board that day were a few dozen passengers, and up ahead he noticed three people waiting on the platform. Entering the station, Pett was travelling at roughly 50 kilometres an hour and preparing to slow down.
Then he saw a man on the platform jump down in front of the train. Slim, with short brown curly hair and a soul patch, he moved so nimbly that Pett thought he was a teenager playing chicken. It looked as though he was going to run across the median to safety. Instead, he paused and laid down on the running rails, with his head on one track.
Pett knew operators who made it to retirement without hitting a jumper. He thought he’d be one of them. Even as the facts rapidly tumbled into place—the man wasn’t getting up, he wasn’t going to get up, he was trying to kill himself—Pett couldn’t believe he was about to hit someone. He blasted the horn, threw on the safety brake and braced himself. He was terrified. Read the rest of this entry »
Prince Philip and 250,000 homes left in the dark
Lights on, lights off (Image: John R. Southern)
A large part of the city was in the dark yesterday evening as a power outage swept Toronto’s financial core and west end at 4:45 p.m. due to a transformer explosion near Kipling station. David Miller turned into a superhero, rescuing a man stuck in the TD Bank Tower, and Twitter overflowed with panicked Torontonians as thousands of tweets poured through the #blackoutTO and #DarkTO feeds. But even though Toronto Hydro unofficially called this power-out a “biggie,” according to CTV’s Twitter feed, we’re pretty sure the Duke of Edinburgh, who had the lights turn out just as Lieutenant Governor David Onley was about to address him at the Royal York Hotel, disagrees. We hope Prince Philip doesn’t think Toronto’s trying to tell him something.
• Power outage hits Toronto [Globe and Mail]
• Power outage in downtown Toronto turns out lights at royal event [AM 770]
• David Miller responds to man’s tweet for help [Toronto Star]
Toronto’s water main nightmare: how we got into this mess and what it will cost to get us out
This winter in Toronto, as many as 70 water mains ruptured every week, causing blackouts, flooding basements to the rafters and creating the perfect recipe for SUV-size sinkholes. How we got into this mess and what it will cost to get us out
(Illustration: Josh Cochran)
Hillary Avenue is a short street spanning the distance between Keele and Rogers Road in a west Toronto neighbourhood populated with Portuguese bakeries, West Indian takeouts and Vietnamese noodle shops. Toward the west end of the street, facing a public school and an adjoining daycare centre, is the tidy, two-storey home belonging to Pedro Lezcano and his family. Lezcano, a 45-year-old native of Paraguay, is the night manager of the Loblaws across the street from Mel Lastman Square. When not taking care of their 15- and 11-year-old sons, Lezcano’s wife, Maria, works as a nanny.
On the night of Saturday, January 2, the Lezcanos spent a quiet evening at home. They ate dinner, watched some TV, and at 10:30 Lezcano went to bed. Sometime in the middle of the night, the water main running beneath Hillary Avenue broke right outside his house. For the next several hours, water flowed undetected from the break, slowly spreading across Lezcano’s backyard and the yards belonging to four of his neighbours. By the early morning, the pooled water was beginning to seep through their foundation walls. Around seven o’clock, a tenant living in the basement of one of the neighbouring houses was wakened by the sound of liquid sloshing against the side of her bed and frantically called 911. Read the rest of this entry »
Toronto garbage strike at centre of Broken Social Scene movie
Kevin Drew playing Kevin Drew (Image: Esparta Palma)
In a thrilling bit of method acting, Broken Social Scene stars as Broken Social Scene in Bruce McDonald’s latest flick. This Movie Is Broken, which premieres this week at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, blurs the border between fiction and reality, mixing a love story with a typical concert movie, as viewers follow two characters to a real Broken Social Scene show.
“Part of the fun was that it all had to be filmed that day,” said Don McKellar, who helped write the script and shouldered some directing duties with McDonald. “The intersection of drama and a real concert was the chief selling point, but of course on the practical side it presented a huge logistical challenge.” According to McKellar, directing the actors while simultaneously capturing live concert footage made for a lot of yelling, running through crowds and getting people to save spots, though we suppose that’s typical behaviour at a concert.
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If everyone simultaneously switches the power back on after Earth Hour, are we flirting with a blackout?
Photo by Jeff Louie
If enough of us were to flick on the lights at the same time, Toronto could find itself cloaked in darkness like we did in August 2003. But the odds of such a disaster resulting from Earth Hour are nil. During the hour of non-power (from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. on the last Saturday in March), participating cities turn off non-essential lighting (the CN Tower’s neon glow, for example) but leave most voltage suckers—like home furnaces, street lights and the TTC—humming. In other words, despite its “Go Green” message, the event is more hype than substance, which explains last year’s Nathan Phillips Square Earth Hour concert, featuring “Turn Out the Lights” singer Nelly Furtado. This year, officials are hoping to reduce electricity usage by at least as much as last year’s 262 megawatts—enough to offset the annual CO2 output of about two and a half Torontonians, but not enough to leave us clamouring for candles.
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