More than 210,000 Hydro Quebec customers were still without power Monday morning after violent storms swept across Quebec over the weekend. The state-owned company is yet to give a deadline for a return to normal, but is aiming to reconnect eight out of 10 Quebecers by Monday evening.
Posted 8:16am Updated 12:38pm
Henri Ouellette-Vézina La Presse
“We think we should have about an 80% recovery at the end of the day. For the rest it will take a little longer because we are at the end of the road with big works,” Energy and Natural Resources Secretary Jonatan Julien said at a news conference in Blainville on Monday.
More than 600 teams or more than 1,200 workers are now mobilized to restore power. This is a significant increase compared to the previous day. Overall, according to Mr. Julien, the storm would have covered a radius of 300 kilometers in length and 100 kilometers in width. “For those who don’t have power, disaster preparedness centers are open in affected regions,” said the minister, who is hoping for a “flash” of recoveries on Monday.
“Today the teams are really on site to rebuild, so we will be re-erecting towers, collecting cables and recovering as many customers as possible as quickly as possible. That really is the priority of the day. And our teams are tireless,” endorsed Hydro-Québec’s Vice President of Operations and Maintenance, Régis Tellier.
The state of affairs
By the start of the day, nearly 60% of out-of-service customers had regained power and work is continuing hour after hour, Hydro-Québec said on Twitter. “It is impossible to provide concrete recovery times for the rest of the affected customers,” the organization said.
It also explains that some of the ongoing disruptions “may last longer due to difficult access conditions, significant damage to the network and the scale of the damage to be recovered”. “These breakdowns require a large number of targeted interventions by our teams. […] We remind you not to go near the cables on the ground for safety reasons,” emphasized the Hydro Quebec teams.
The regions hardest hit by the blackouts are the Laurentians, Lanaudière and Outaouais, each of which has tens of thousands of Quebecers without power. However, the Sûreté du Québec reported no major events related to Monday’s outages.
Number of customers without electricity
Laurentians: 98,727 of 362,065
Lanaudière: 57,757 of 263,240
Outaouais: 46,536 of 224,649
All of Quebec: 207,758 out of 4,492,115
According to the Hydro-Québec report at 12:16 p.m.
Strong wind, heavy damage
Strong winds were recorded in several places in Quebec on Saturday late afternoon, notably on Lake Memphremagog with gusts of up to 151 km/h, in Trois-Rivières with peaks of 96 km/h and in Gatineau up to 90 km/h H . “Infrastructure cannot withstand these strong winds,” Mr Tellier said on Monday, without saying he was surprised by the extent of the material damage, the worst he had seen in at least a decade.
In Ontario, peak speeds of 132 km/h were measured in the Waterloo region. In Quebec, around 550,000 customers were without power at the height of the event, Hydro-Quebec said.
“The storm caused extensive damage in several regions, particularly the Laurentians and the Outaouais. With Hydro-Québec, we will ensure that all Quebecers are reconnected as soon as possible. I thank the teams who are working hard on the ground,” Prime Minister François Legault previously wrote on social networks.
Only one victim has been listed in Quebec so far, a 51-year-old woman who died when the boat she was in capsized in the Ottawa River near Masson-Angers during Saturday’s storm.
Thunderstorms killed eight others in Ontario. Seven people were killed by falling trees at locations across the province during Saturday’s storm and an eighth was killed by a falling tree branch after Sunday’s storm. As of Monday morning, around 200,000 Hydro One customers were still without power.
With Vincent Larin, La Presse and The Canadian Press