(Montreal) If the trend continues, Hydro-Québec will be able to restore power to 95% of its customers plunged into darkness since Wednesday’s ice storm by Sunday evening as promised, even if some Quebecers will have to resign to wait any longer.
After the day on Monday, “almost all” of the homes will have regained electricity, said Régis Tellier, vice-president of operations and maintenance for Hydro-Québec, during a press conference Sunday at the end of the pre- noon, in Montreal. According to him, priority customers such as private residences for seniors and CHSLDs have all been restored.
If he cannot guarantee that everyone will have power again on Monday, it is because it is not always possible to estimate the extent of the damage before seeing it. “When you get to the field, that’s when you can see the complexity,” he says, citing cases where four or five branches have fallen in one place and need to be removed. “Sometimes it can take two or three teams. »
Some subscribers will however have to wait until Tuesday due to complex cases to be resolved, said the director of energy system control at Hydro-Québec, Maxime Nadeau.
By 12:15 p.m. Sunday, there were just over 100,000 state-owned utility customers still without power, which meant that just under 90% of the 1.1 million homes that had lost their access to heat and light this week had already been reconnected.
The Montreal region remained the most affected. It had more than 70,000 customers without power, but the situation had improved significantly from the previous day. Saturday morning, the report showed nearly 190,000 customers without heating or electricity in Montreal.
The other regions still affected by outages are Outaouais (about 12,000), Montérégie (about 11,000) and Laval (about 6,000).
It should be noted that the number of customers represents the quantity of dwellings or businesses, and not the number of people.
Mr. Tellier warned that the pace of recovery was expected to slow on Sunday, as the remaining outages each affect fewer customers. “We keep the same pace, he says, but when we fall into the secondary sections, it’s the same effort, but few customers. »
In all, he explains, 1,500 workers are in the field, and 40% of them work in Montreal.
In order to offer respite to people who regained power on Saturday evening, and to those who will be reconnected in the coming hours, the government has announced that food markets will be able to remain open in these regions on Sunday, despite Easter Day. . This will also be the case in Lanaudière, where the number of breakdowns was high on Saturday.
On Thursday, 400,000 customers were reconnected to the network, just like on Friday. However, the pace slowed somewhat on Saturday, to just under 200,000 customers reconnected, but the state-owned company warned that it was now busy working on outages that affect fewer customers – which ensures that fewer households have electricity at once.
In the meantime, the government recalled on Saturday that more than 100 emergency centers have opened their doors in the most affected regions, in order to allow people for whom the blackout is prolonged to go to warm up, eat and recharge their batteries. electronic appliances.
