Quebecers still without power after first snowstorm of season

Paul Constantineau doesn’t like being kept in the dark — quite literally.

The 26-year-old from Saint-Lambert is still without power since the first real snowstorm of the season hit Montreal and southern Quebec Sunday — with 30 cm falling in some areas.

Constantineau lost power Sunday at 10 p.m. It was still not back by Tuesday morning.

“We thought for sure it was going to be back on Monday,” Constantineau told CityNews. “First it was Monday morning, then turned out to be Monday afternoon, and when I got back from work yesterday, it turned out to be they’re supposed to restore today in the afternoon.

“Luckily we have a wooden stove downstairs. We installed it since the ice storm (of 1998). We’ve been burning wood slowly, keeping it warm just a little bit.”

Making things especially tricky for Constantineau is that he takes care of his 96-year-old grandmother, who relies heavily on electricity.

“She has to get up with an electrical chair, but I have no electricity,” he said. “I have to take care of her and soon I’ll be going out to get some food and get some hot coffee or hot tea.

“I had to miss work today to take care of my grandmother, but family comes first, right?”

WATCH: Customers still without power after Montreal’s first snow

---

Constantineau is hardly alone. By 6 a.m. Tuesday, more than 26,000 Hydro-Québec customers were still without electricity. The most affected regions: Montérégie (15,400) and Estrie (10,600). By 6 p.m., roughly 6,400 customers were still in the dark.

At the height of the outages Monday morning, more than 110,000 Quebecers did not have electricity at their homes, mainly in those two regions.

“When you look to the Info-pannes map on the Hydro-Quebec website, you can see that from Châteauguay to Longueuil following the Saint-Lawrence River, those are the areas where there are more outages,” said Hydro spokesperson Maxence Huard-Lefebvre. “And in some cases, the outages occurred (Monday) night. So there are not necessarily outages from the beginning of the event. It can be that there were some branches that were fragilized by the snow that took more time to break.”

Huard-Lefebvre says the situation becomes problematic when temperatures hover around the freezing point, making snow wetter and heavier.

“There was accumulation of snow on branches, on trees that caused some branches to break and to fall on the power lines,” he said. “And this is the reason why we had outages.”

‘The cold is something that you can’t get used to’

Saint-Lambert resident Mayer Romaner has also been without power since Sunday.

The 80-year-old was forced to get a hotel room because the temperature in his bedroom dropped to eight degrees Celsius.

“I’m glad I can afford it, and take the burden off because it’s very cold,” Romaner told CityNews.

“The cold is something that you can’t get used to, especially when you get older. Seems to go right to the bones.”

The weight of fallen branches crashed onto Hydro lines on Romaner’s property. Branches also fell on his roof and balcony.

“What I’m most concerned about is that even if they return power to the customers, my situation is rather particular because the branches are now pressing against the wires, coming in from the main wires of Hydro,” Romaner said.

“I’m not the only person on the block. I can imagine if I’m judging by what happened to me then the other people must (be in a similar situation).”

Romaner says if power’s not back by Tuesday afternoon, he’ll be going back to the hotel.

Power restored to 95% of households by Tuesday night: Hydro-Quebec

Hydro-Québec predicted Monday the vast majority of customers still without power should have it back by midday Tuesday. By Tuesday, that prediction was updated to 95 per cent of customers by Tuesday end of day.

“There will still be at the end of the day some more complicated cases where the work can be longer,” Huard-Lefebvre said. “So there will unfortunately still be some customers affected by an outage at the end of the day. But our team will be on the field until the last customer is affected will be reconnected.

“Maybe it’s not impossible that because of the snow accumulation, there are new branches that break and fall. So it is possible that new outages occur. But I think that the worst is done.”

He adds it’s a “big priority” for Hydro-Quebec over the next years be able to provide the most accurate information during outages.

“I understand this it’s a difficult task to do, a lot of broken branches. You can’t control the weather. You can’t control where the trees fall,” said Constantineau.

“I was hoping we would rely on what they said at first. We were supposed to get the electricity back yesterday, but we haven’t got any. We’re hoping it to have it back today.”

According to Environment Canada, weather conditions were expected to be partly sunny but colder from Tuesday to Thursday.

The federal agency’s longer-term forecasts signal warmer weather. In Montreal, from Saturday to Monday, temperatures will cross the freezing point and there will be rain.

“We will follow very closely the situation in the next hours to see how the meteorological conditions are evolving,” said Huard-Lefebvre. “But right now it’s better. And we have about 500 people on the field, workers that are working to restore power as fast as they can.”

The City of Montreal announced the snow loading operation by road workers was to begin early Tuesday morning in various boroughs.

–With files from La Presse Canadienne