For 10 days, Lynn Ashdown was locked in her apartment on the 11th floor, alone and scared. Her Fisher Heights apartment building lost power in a storm on May 21, and without a backup generator, the elevators had stopped.
“I was a prisoner here for 10 days without the means to get out. This has serious consequences. “My medical problems have gotten worse, my cognitive health has gotten worse, my mental health has gotten worse,” Ashdown said.
Ashdown uses a wheelchair and deals with a brain injury. She was better prepared than most for the potential dangers of power outages, but after 72 hours in the dark, she began to panic.
“Definitely the worst case scenario. What goes through my mind is, “Okay, how do I take care of my medical needs?” She said.
Fortunately, Ashdown has experience as a doctor and she has managed to take care of her own medical needs as much as possible. Friends and her doctors also helped by bringing food to her apartment and carrying portable chargers for her cell phone, her only means of communicating with people outside her small apartment.
“It will take me a long time to overcome this experience. This really traumatized me. It was worse than the worst-case scenario I imagined, “Ashdown said.
Now, after the storm, it is advocating for all residential buildings in the city to have backup generators for their elevators.
In Toronto, the city council recommended that the buildings have a backup generator, but the city did not implement the proposal.
In Ottawa, some new buildings are equipped with backup power for elevators, but city councilor Keith Egley says thousands live in buildings without safety precautions.
Egley will make a proposal at the next council meeting, calling on the city to ensure that all apartments have backup generators, but city officials say the legislation could be difficult.
“If a building was built in the 1960s, it is a set of rules; if it was built in the 2000s, there is another set of rules. In all likelihood, we will find that we need to go to the countryside to get some harmonization of the rules, “said Stephen Willis, general manager of planning, real estate and development for the city of Ottawa.
In the nearby Maryvale Gardens, others with disabilities faced similar challenges, but managed to escape the long hassles thanks to working generators.
“The generator lost power on Tuesday, ran out of gas and we lost electricity and were left in the dark on the 11th floor for a whole day, but then they turned it back on,” said Monica Belanger, who lives on the 11th floor of her apartment building. building with her husband Stephen, who also uses a wheelchair.
“I had to cancel his home care for a week and it was very difficult,” she added.
Ashdown says she hopes city law can better protect those like her and many others who have been blocked since.
“Once the dust settles, people forget, people forget very quickly, so it’s time to act,” Ashdown said.
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