Flood delays milk quota exchange

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

by SUSAN MANN

The opening of the February milk quota exchange has been delayed by four days because of a flood on the main floor of Dairy Farmers of Ontario head office in Mississauga.

Bill Mitchell, Dairy Farmers assistant communications director, says the flood knocked out their computer and phone system for five days and forced the condensation of this month’s two-day board meeting to one day. The meeting will be held Friday to deal with essential matters only and it’s at the Egg Farmers of Ontario board office in Mississauga.

The flood was caused by a water main break near the entrance to the building on Campobello Road sometime during the night on Jan. 13, he explains. By 3 a.m. on Jan. 14 there was so much flooding in the building alarms were triggered and some systems were shorted out.

The quota exchange, the first one featuring administrative changes to bids and offers, was scheduled to open Jan. 20 but will now begin on Jan. 24 at 8:30 a.m. The deadline to place bids or offers with a customer service representative is 4:30 p.m. on Feb. 1, while the deadline for farmers entering bids or offers online is 11:59 p.m. on Feb. 1.

Mitchell says the entire first floor of the building was flooded. Dairy Farmers doesn’t have a monetary estimate yet but the damage was considerable. There was an inch to an inch-and-a-half of water and mud in various locations.

Water also gushed in to the secure room that holds the organization’s computer mainframe and servers hitting sensors and shorting out systems. Mitchell says there wasn’t any damage to the servers and mainframe but the high humidity levels made it impossible to continue operating the computers.

Dairy Farmers web site wasn’t affected because it operates on an external server, Mitchell explains. Farmers could see the web site but they couldn’t get into the personal password-protected area because that needed a connection from the organization’s mainframe, which was down until Tuesday afternoon. Everything is back up and running now.

Mitchell says all the carpeting, baseboard heating and first two or three feet of drywall up the wall on the first floor had to be removed and will be replaced. Restoration of the first floor is expected to take four to six weeks.

Structural engineers are also assessing whether there is damage to the building’s structure. “We don’t know yet the full extent of the damage,” Mitchell says. BF