A week after the storm which plunged more than 554,000 homes into darkness, nearly 9,000 customers, the most isolated, are still waiting for the return of electricity.
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Saturday morning, Hydro-Québec still had to intervene on 1,100 sites.
“Several of these locations are in remote areas and the repairs, sometimes very long, will only restore service to a small number of customers at a time,” the company said in a statement.
Two-thirds of outages, ie more than 900 interruptions, would affect 10 customers or less.
The main regions affected remain the Laurentians, Lanaudière and Outaouais. New outages were declared Saturday morning in the Laurentians region, thus increasing the total toll of outages in Quebec.
More than 2,000 workers were mobilized to restore service.
At the height of the storm last Saturday, there were more than 554,000 customers out of order, recalled Hydro-Quebec.
As of 7:30 a.m. this Saturday, there were about 8,900 customers left whose outages began on May 21 or May 22.
“The already weakened vegetation is affected by heavy rainfall, causing it to sag on the network and cause further outages. Our teams keep up the pace and remain mobilized in order to replenish the majority of these customers over the weekend,” detailed the Crown corporation.
According to Hydro-Québec, 90% of outages are related to vegetation.
A total of 500 poles were broken and must be replaced and more than 200 transformers must be changed.