City Battered By Mother Nature

The back end of Jalapenoz Restaurant on Oak Street

The storm that ripped through North Bay late Monday afternoon spared nothing in its wake as it toppled huge trees at their roots, downed power lines and plunged the city into darkness.

City officials were quick to respond and set up a central command post at the North Bay Police Services building on Princess Street and Mayor Victor Fedeli applauds the city’s emergency crews with how they handled the situation.

“Absolutely top marks to the Emergency Management Team that’s in place,” he says.

“We worked hard on our program to make sure that when an emergency does happen that we can respond properly. I think we saw the fruits of our labour payoff because we had no serious incidents to report once so ever."

Fedeli says the next step is to get the rest of the city and area businesses back up and running, as well as clean up the streets, but otherwise he says given the situation the city is amazingly in good shape.

“Actually the people of the business community have been very patient. They all have their homes and families to worry about as well, so they really haven’t started to call and I don’t expect they will either. They look and see that everybody is in the same boat, so they know it’s a level playing field for all of them.”

John Cutsey of Cutsey Business Systems Limited on Airport Hill said the power outage had far reaching consequences worldwide as his clients were unable to operate while his systems were down.

“Actually it was devastating,” says Cutsey.

“We’re an application service provider, we have a company in Detroit that runs their whole company on my system here in North Bay, when my system’s down…they’re down.”

“We have Fila in Italy, and we store all the available to sell products of Fila worldwide, in colour, size and style. And it is updated on our system every night, so this morning the European people and the rest of the world could not see available inventory cause our system was down,” states Cutsey.

Realistically, Cutsey says his business needs to have a power generator and so this morning he went shopping and bought one.

“We’re putting in a full fledged heavy duty one going forward,” he states.

“North Bay has been so consistent in having good power that we really haven’t had the need. But now with something like this that puts it right in front of your face…now we’ve finally done it.”

Jalapenoz Restaurant on Main Street also felt the wrath of Mother Nature, as the back end of the restaurant suffered extensive damage when a power line fell onto the establishment. The owners say they also suffered water damage in the kitchen and lost the hood of their grill to the wind. They anticipate that they will be out of business for about two weeks.

Fedeli says the primary goal at this point is to see the entire city return to full power, but says some areas could face lengthy delays.

“We have power in fifty percent of the city right now, but we still have 25 to 30 utility poles down. We don’t expect full power to be restored for 24 more hours.”