A week after freezing rain, nearly 2,900 customers still without power

As of 2 p.m. Wednesday, there were still nearly 2,900 Hydro-Quebec customers without power in their homes, one week after the ice storm, including more than 2,100 on the island of Montreal.

The freezing rain hit last Wednesday. At the height of the crisis, more than 1.1 million of the utility’s customers were without power.

As of Wednesday, most of the remaining customers without power were in Montreal, the Outaouais region, as well as in the Gaspésie – Îles-de-la-Madeleine region.

On Tuesday, Hydro-Quebec spokesman Francis Labbé explained that some of the outages to be repaired were very complex, with a lot of damage and in locations that were sometimes difficult for crews to reach.

“In many places, the outages are located behind residences. Our crews have to be able to access and clear all the vegetation to get to them. There are a lot of trees on the ground, so each outage requires a lot of work from different crews and brings in fewer and fewer customers,” Labbé said.

On Tuesday, Richard Liebmann, director of the Service de sécurité incendie de Montréal (SSIM), announced the closure of the shelter sites for citizens still without power, because the situation was improving.

Quebec’s electrical grid needs strengthening: expert 

The weeklong power outages across Quebec are raising questions about the resilience of the province’s electrical grid.

Francois Bouffard, an electrical engineering professor at McGill University, says elected leaders need to consider how to strengthen the grid – and how to pay for doing it.

Bouffard says many of the areas most affected by outages have power lines in backyards, making electrical wires difficult to access.

He says burying power lines, particularly in dense urban areas, would protect them from falling trees and branches, but he says doing so is expensive.

Hydro spokeswoman Caroline Des Rosiers says it’s too early to determine what lessons can be drawn from the storm, which cut power to more than a million customers.

Alain Vaillancourt, the person in charge of public security on the Executive Committee of the City of Montreal, lamented the loss of thousands of trees.

“For every tree that fell, we will plant another. We want Montreal to remain resilient and part of resilience is having lots of trees. It’s not just the ice storm, but there are also heat episodes, heat islands, so it’s important to have a lot of trees, but they have to be well maintained,” he explained.

In total, the City of Montreal received more than 900 calls to report fallen trees and more than 4,500 requests for fallen branches. These figures do not include data specific to Montreal parks.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French April 12, 2023.