Advance planning and this powerful generator provided emergency power during the 2003 blackout. DISASTER PLANNING AND RECOVERY Blackout Preparation A Case Study By Vincent Cianfarani, RCM The theme of the ACMO luncheon in January was Blackout 2003 Emergency Backup Power what have we learned and how do we deal with the questions facing property managers regarding emergency back-up power. This subject is very close to my heart. One of the condominium corporations that we manage a three-building highrise consisting of 900 units (and our sister corporation of the same size) looked like a small glittering island within the darkened city of Toronto during the blackout of 2003. During this amazing event, our residents had hot and cold water, and all major components were operating as if the electricity had never stopped (13 elevators, 12 domestic hot water boilers, all circulating pumps, overhead garage doors and all the lights in the underground garage, corridors and common courtyard). Let me tell you how this was achieved and share some of my experiences. When these buildings were built in 1970 71, there was no requirement for back-up power generators; each building had a battery bank that provided a very small amount of emergency lighting in the common areas. Even with all the preventative maintenance, money and time spent to maintain the banks, they only lasted about 25 minutes when the electricity was stopped and then there was complete darkness. As a manager for both corporations then, I spent many hours thinking about what would happen in case of a complete loss of power when the winter wind chill reaches minus 35 40 C. I am sure most managers can visualize the consequences, but for the average person, the scenario would go something like this. The first hour, there would be little emergency lighting and not much would happen. The second hour, the buildings would start to get cold and people would begin to call the superintendent. By the fourth hour, you start to see some frozen broken pipes and radiators by exit/entrance doors. By the fifth hour, other pipes closer to the outside walls would start to freeze, not to mention the pipes in the boiler rooms on top of the roof! If this happened at night, you would have the buildings in total darkness with no elevators, overcrowded units with elderly or sick people and small children. You can imagine the chaos that could occur when you could have loss of life and millions of dollars in damages. At that time, our financial position in the two corporations was limited and to spend $400,000 to $500,000 for a back-up power system was stretching our resources quite a
bit. Our meager resources were a result of minimum contributions to the reserve fund and a minimum increase to the budget. Under our corporation documents, the board could recommend a budget to the owners but the owners had the final say at the AGM. If the owners did not approve the budget, the boards could continue with the old budget and then special assess everyone at the end of the year quite a messy job. The courts put a stop to this in the mid 1990s and since then, all the boards of directors in condominium corporations can now approve the budgets. I managed to convince both boards to install emergency power generators easily. An electrical engineer was hired, research was done and specifications were prepared. Etobicoke Hydro and Ontario Hydro felt it would be better to install one generator per building. We did not agree and decided to install one generator for all three buildings rather than one generator for each building. During this initial planning the Ministry of Environment informed us that each generator chimney had to be situated a minimum of 90 feet from any residential unit. Now think about it each corporation had to provide three generator rooms far enough away from each building for the exhaust to be 90 feet away from any residential unit. Plus three maintenance contracts were probably needed. It took a few months to convince Etobicoke Hydro and Ontario Hydro but, finally, they agreed with us to install one generator to supply all three buildings with emergency power. Our electrical engineer then completed the specifications. We decided to install a generator in the underground garage, far away from the three buildings and close to the perimeter for the exhaust system. Since the generator was far away from the buildings (a minimum of 500 feet to a maximum of 900 feet), the specifications called for two sets of copper cables going to each building. One set of cables would not do it because the distance would cause too much loss of electricity. In addition, the Etobicoke Building Department wanted us to fireproof the cables with two thick pieces of drywall. The engineer put out the specifications for tendering and when the tenders were received, the estimated cost of the generator was close to $700,000 for each condominium corporation. After board members recovered from the shock of the cost of the generator, I recommended not making a decision that night and leaving the matter for the following board meeting as I wanted to do a bit more research. I believed there must be another way. There were two main reasons the cost of the generator was so high. The distance from the generator to each building and all the new equipment that was required to provide electricity from the generator to the major components of our buildings. (The average new building today of, let s say, 200 units with three elevators will only have one elevator on the generator, a few lights here and there to supply minimum lighting, in some cases, the emergency voice communication and that s it.) When installing a new generator in an existing building you only need the minimum requirement. For instance, if you want one elevator out of a bank of three, special switches have to be installed, some for other matters like one boiler for heating and one boiler for the domestic hot water in order to keep the pipes from freezing during a power outage. Most equipment that we are referring to is located in boiler rooms on top of the roof. Now, special electrical risers with four cables have to be brought up to the roof to reach the equipment that you want to accommodate to run during a power outage.
After several days of research and thinking, I came up with a solution and a motto let s go bigger to save money. I went back to the board with a revised estimate and a plan. I informed the board at YCC #42 that we could have a much larger generator to supply power to all the components of the building (much more than the original specification called for) and have electricity generated by the new generator left over, and all of this for $450,000. It took several seconds for the board members to ask, How do you expect to do this miracle? At this point, I handed them some written material. 1. We will spend $400,000 for the generator and buy an extra large one (the generator we purchased was KW 800 and 1,000 KVA). 2. We will eliminate the eight runs of 700 MCM copper cables going from the generator room to each building. We will replace them with three runs of cromolox cables (cromolox cables are insulated and they do not require a fire barrier around them and the 4th neutral cable). 3. We will generate the electricity with a standby generator at 600 volts and install a transformer in each building to convert the electricity to 208 volts before we connect it to the electrical distribution system. 4. We will energize all the existing electrical lines going to each boiler room from the electrical room on the ground floor. This will save a fortune by avoiding the need for four new cables from the electrical room to the boiler room in each building (most new buildings do not have enough space to accommodate the extra cables in the electrical distribution system). 5. Since we have a large staff due to the size of our corporation, and since a lot of our jobs are in-house, we will not require a general electrical contractor to carry out the complete installation. We will hire a master electrician with two knowledgeable electrical apprentices and some staff can also help with installing cables or large pieces of equipment (no unions were around at that time). With the above changes we will be able to reduce the original estimate of $700,000 considerably. The reasons for the reduced savings are: 1. The installation of three cromolox cables to each building, instead of 8 700 MCM copper cables. 2. The elimination of the four MCM cables going to each roof. 3. We would become the general contractor thus reducing any profit that would have been included in the estimate. 4. There would be a reduced workload to install the three cromolox cables to each building, much lighter than 8 700 MCM cables. The only items that will change are the cost of our generator (approximately $40,000 more than our estimate) and the addition of three transformers that will cost approximately $12,000 each. These added costs brought our estimate for the complete job to $450,000. At this point, the board felt much more comfortable with my proposal. The following day, the electrical engineer amended the specifications to install our emergency stand-by power generator and re-sized all the component parts accordingly. The work proceeded quite smoothly for about 10 weeks and everything worked like a Swiss watch, with only a minor hitch. The final cost of the generator at YCC #42 was about $470,000, which included the hours that some corporation staff put into the job.
The cost for the same arrangement at YCC #60 about a year later was approximately $435,000. The second time around, we had learned and used a few shortcuts. The sophisticated reader probably by now knows that because of some of the electrical terminology in this article, it does not make an electrical engineer out of me or even an experienced electrician. I am a person with an inquisitive mind, good eyes and good ears. A couple of days after the board meeting at YCC #42, I was inspecting the grounds along Dixon Road and, of course, thinking about our $700,000 generator when something in front of me caught my attention and started the ball rolling. Along Dixon Road, on the north side, there are electrical posts on the road with electrical cables on them. Three of these cables are a little thicker than the others and stand out. Over the years, when I was managing YCC #42 and YCC #60 at the same time, whenever Etobicoke Hydro serviced the underground cables that provided hydro to our six buildings, they would let me know because during that time there was usually a minor electrical spike as they switched our electrical service from the underground service to the three overhead cables on the electrical posts on Dixon Road. Now, my question was how can those three cables supply electricity to our six buildings, 1,800 homes, but we would need two runs of four cables each from the generator to each building to supply standby electricity? I telephoned Etobicoke Hydro and asked them the same question. Their answer was quite simple it is a different system. The electricity on those three cables has 600 volts. When we reach one of your buildings, we have a transformer that steps down the electricity to 208 watts and then we supply it to your buildings. My next call was to our electrical engineer. I asked could we generate electricity at 600 watts and have a transformer in each building to convert to 208 watts so we can use three cromolox cables to each building instead of eight? The engineer took a few seconds to answer and then said, I think it is possible. The rest is history. My caution to managers and boards is to make sure that the company supplying you with diesel fuel has a generator themselves in order to be able to supply fuel even in a complete power outage like the one we had in 2003. Always keep a proper paper trail and good records of what you do and what you propose to your board. Insofar as records go, when the work was in progress at YCC #42, we received a copy of a letter sent to our electrical engineer from another electrical engineer threatening to sue the condominium corporation, Vista Property Management (my company) and our electrical engineer because we were using his idea for our generator and he wanted to be compensated. Apparently, our engineer met with the other engineer who had helped an electrical general contractor prepare a quote for our generator three months earlier. The other engineer claimed he had discussed the idea of let s go bigger to save money with our engineer. Our engineer was able to prove the date of their meeting, and we, on our part, had kept notes with dates, and the board meetings had taken place two weeks prior to their meeting. Based on the evidence, he decided not to sue. Vince Cianfarani got his first job in property management in 1976. Soon after he formed his own company, Vista Property Management Inc. Vince participated with other senior property managers to prepare the questions for the first RCM exam. He became an RCM with the second group of participants. Vince now works part time while his son, Mark, also an RCM, runs the day-to-day business.
* * Condominium Manager Magazine Fall 2004