The public meeting with N&L Hydro last evening was reasonably well attended, about 27 or so from the community, though several of those were staff of either the NICG or NG or local media, still not bad.

I was disappointed that only one person from Hydro [Bill Nippard the area Manager] was in attendance but more on that later.

Bill gave an overview of the history of the new plant [built 2002 in response to community concerns], what happened to cause the fire [ruptured fuel line] and an update on what is happening at the plant at the moment.
Bill gave thanks to the local Volunteer Fire Brigade whose actions saved the whole kit and caboodle from being destroyed.

After Bills overview presentation many questions came from the community. Most centered on the three back up generators and questioned why the units were not in ready to use condition on arrival.
Bill explained Hydros point of view, the urgency, time of year, unavailability of suitable new units. One new unit was available in Arizona but this was put dismissed due to length of delivery time.

So we ended up with back up for back up units from two other plants, they are old but there hours of operation are not that high, last overhaul was about two years ago.

Bill explained the reasons for the outages since the back ups were put on line, mistakes were made in connecting to the substation causing on outage on 10 November for 55 hours for some.

Three Hydro engineering disciplines have to inspect the whole situation at the plant, this process is taking time and won’t be completed for another several weeks when a report will be submitted to regional Hydro for them to take any action and make any corrections. Most were puzzled with this scenario.

A new 1250 KW unit is on order and will be delivered by September 2009; the original three units are 850 KW.

Meantime work on the two damaged units will proceed one at a time. Extensive wring and structural damage will also me addressed simultaneously.

All this is supposed to be taking place in conjunction with getting all the bugs out of the three mobiles, preventative maintance work is still be carried out on these. One unit is waiting on a gasket for the water pump.

As to personal, this will go from a computer controlled plant with a staff of two to three to a manual controlled plant with four attendance working shifts.
Also promised are three trade’s people, one mechanic, one electrician and one lineman who will be stationed in Nain for the duration of the re build.

To summarize and in my view:

Regional Hydro initially responded very quickly after the fire. On the ground work force did a great job under difficult circumstances.
Some in the community saw this as reassuring, this broke down when more outages occurred. Mistakes were made and oversight was not forthcoming putting extra pressure on the folks on the ground.

I feel Corporate Hydro has not responded to the situation in an adequate way. They have not acted in a way to indicate to the community that Corporate Hydro takes the situation seriously.

Most of the community, including me, would take this as meaning that it falls back to the same mentality many have: it is Northern Labrador, remote, and we don’t have to deal with things there as we would if it was in a more central location.

The community has to be more pro active, and less polite, to tell them that the situation is serious, it is adding undue financial and psychological pressures to the people and we want to be treated the same way others are treated.