(Montreal) More than 30,000 Hydro-Quebec customers have regained power in the past 24 hours, but the teams from the state-owned company still have their work cut out for them.
Posted at 8:10 a.m.
The number of homes without electricity had passed just under the 50,000 mark on Thursday morning, according to data published at 7 a.m. by Hydro-Québec.
As has been the case since severe thunderstorms hit Quebec and Ontario late Saturday afternoon, the region most affected by the outages was the Laurentians, with nearly 30,000 customers still plunged into darkness.
On the Outaouais side, just over 11,000 customers were still without electricity, while this number rose to 8,900 in Lanaudière.
Hydro-Québec was still reporting about 1,500 outages in progress, more than half of which were in the Laurentians.
During a press briefing on Wednesday, Hydro-Québec estimated that it would be able to restore service for the majority of affected customers by the end of the day on Thursday.
Some residences that are more isolated or more difficult to access will have to wait longer, however, until Friday or Saturday.
The corporation’s president and CEO, Sophie Brochu, said the scale of the disaster was the worst since the 1998 ice storm.
The line of violent thunderstorms hit a strip of territory 300 kilometers long by 100 kilometers wide, a magnitude rarely seen.
No less than 500 poles and 100 transformers will have been replaced by the end of the restoration work. So far, some 300 poles have been replanted.
Ten people lost their lives in Saturday’s thunderstorms, nine in Ontario and one in Quebec.
Sophie Brochu said she believes that this operation will cost the state-owned company “several tens of millions”, but she assured that these sums will not be passed on to customers.