Click here for M.B. Foster sponsor message

What started as a flicker late on the night of January 7 escalated into a complete outage covering thousands of Canadian customers in the eastern part of Ontario where the company is headquartered. Birket Foster said his company had to scramble when they learned after 48 hours of no power that the utility might not be able to restore electric service for up to three weeks.

Residential and business losses in Canada were in the $1 billion range from the storm, a multi-day affair that delivered six inches of ice to knock out 600,000 customers’ power, including much of the Ottawa River valley in eastern Ontario and western Quebec. M.B. Foster is headquartered in Chesterville, the second largest employer in a village of 1,600 about 30 minutes from Ottawa, deep in Canadian farmland.

While technical support came to a halt at places like Air Canada in Montreal as a result of the storm, M.B. Foster used employee skills that don’t get exercised everyday to power its systems, phones and offices through the blackout.

“Thank the lord for the staff we have,” Foster said. “One is a certified electrician and Ontario Hydro linesman [Trevor Treurniet], one is a mechanic, and the final touch is an R&D guy who was a radar technician. There was a guardian angel looking after M.B. Foster Associates.”

The R&D staffer, John Middelvein, “knew a ton about both oscilliscopes and old generators. He was able to synch the generator up at 60 hz so we could run the computers and phones.”

Once it became apparent that electric service to the company’s campus wouldn’t be restored, a marine generator became the primary responsibility of Rob Foster. The 5KV generator wasn’t delivering power at the correct frequency, however, keeping it from serving the three HP 3000s that run support, development, e-mail and customer tracking systems for the company. Middlevein, an NT support technician who had joined the company only in November, had military experience with the particular model of oscilloscope M.B. Foster had borrowed to condition the generator’s power.

While many businesses endured one- to two-week shutdowns as a result of the storm, the teamwork at M.B. Foster had the company online after a long weekend with little sleep. Foster said he turned some of his staff back to the community to do door-to-door checks on residents, ensuring residents had food and fuel for heat or helping them to a local shelter.

The problems of finding adequate fuel for generators (diesel comes in two grades, and only one is useful in below-freezing conditions), getting the generator warm enough to start (a local dairy farmer across the road warmed it up in a barn) and adjusting power to control harmonics for computers got solved over the weekend. More than a week after the blackout the local utility restored power, but delivered it with a reversed phase – which made the dairy farmer’s milking machines run backwards, and would have fried out M.B. Foster’s computers. A warning from across the road saved the equipment, “just one of the many good things that happened as a result of the storm.”

“We have the makings of a disaster recovery plan now,” Foster said, using the 5KV generator that now kicks in automatically on a blackout. “I wish it would have been planned first and disastered later,” but the plan has the benefit of being built under sustained disaster conditions. “We all got a PhD in power,” he said.