Sunday clean up after high winds

Strong winds on Saturday put many to work Sunday.

"It's a lot but thank goodness nothing hit the house and nothing did too much damage anywhere," said Jesse Darmon who was outside on a sunny Sunday afternoon cleaning debris with her husband Alex.

"The ice storm hit us a bit harder but the wind that came this past weekend kind of finished it off," Darmon said. "Everything that was just hanging a little bit ended up on the ground this time."

There were power outages across the region with minimal impact according to officials from local power suppliers.

"We werent’ too bad," said Farooq Hyder, Manager at ELK Energy in Essex. "Compared to the last storm we were pretty lucky."

The outage did leave residents like Wendy Reid in the dark. She and her husband were without power for almost four hours until 5 this morning.

"For me it's not a problem," said Reid, "but for my husband it is because he's on a CPAP machine which helps him breathe at night and without it he can't sleep so when the power goes out he has to just get up because otherwise he can't breathe."

Reid says she and her husband worry every time a weather event hits the Windsor-Essex County region. "We were just looking online today to find out about battery power to see if we can get one for a CPAP machine."

Companies like Essex Power are responsible for mitigating the impacts of these weather events. Two poles were affected by the wind in Amherstburg. "That outage would have affected two-thousand people. We were able to re-route the power to only affect twenty people."

Essex Power says companies try to build redundancies into their systems to minimize outage effects. "We try and have as many scenarios covered off where everywhere is redundancies, where it can be fed two ways."

If you see a compromised pole or downed wires, you're asked to call your power supplier. "You don't know what kind of voltage is involved in the pole," Barile said. "Whether the pole is gonna fall down in the next 10 minutes or in the next hour so the rule of thumb is stay away, call us so we can take care of the problem."