Dino Chiesa may be one of the Toronto area's major landlords, but his 24th-floor apartment did not have water yesterday.
Like many residents of the 30 Toronto-area high-rises that his company, Residential Equities REIT, operates, he did not have water while the power was off because the pumps that send it to the top of the building were not working.
When power returned around 5 a.m., he still did not have water because a pressure valve broke when the system started up.
But that was the least of his worries.
Mr. Chiesa's problem, like that of many other landlords, was to get water to people above the lower floors, and his building superintendents were busy taking drinking water to tenants who could not come down for it.
"I can't do much until people get power, other than make sure people have water for health and safety, and that we've taken care of.
"For washing and taking a shower, they are going to have to wait until the power goes back on."
For people who live in tall buildings, the equation was simple. Without power, unless you live on a low floor where the pressure from the city's system will send water to your unit, you do not have water.
Although emergency power systems operate lighting and alarm systems -- and in some cases an elevator -- they generally do not power the water pumps in older buildings.
Derek Ballantyne, president of Toronto Community Housing, said the situation in the city's public housing was somewhat better because TCH's emergency generators operate the water pumps.
But the TCH system was strained because the company needed to run its emergency system longer then expected.
"In some cases, we're running out of fuel; in others, we're having to shut down the generators for an hour to rest them.
"And in one case, we had a generator fire."
He said that where the housing company cannot keep water pressure up, it will provide an outlet on a lower floor where all tenants can obtain water and carry it up to those who cannot come down for it, and that there were plans to go through the buildings unit by unit last night looking for tenants who needed water.
High-rise buildings are the only places in Toronto where water problems have been reported as a result of the blackout. Large parts of Cleveland and Detroit were without water.
Toronto Works Commissioner Barry Gutteridge said in an interview yesterday that the system was at about 75-per-cent pumping capacity on Thursday night, enough for Toronto to run normally for 24 hours.