It was not just the snow that fell in abundance during the Christmas winter storm: the bill from Hydro-Québec, whose employees worked tirelessly for days to restore power to hundreds of thousands of customers affected by various outages, amounts to more than $55 million, the state-owned company revealed Thursday.
Between the morning of December 23 and December 25, 7,529 power outages were caused across the province by “a storm of rare intensity characterized by very violent winds”.
A total of 640,000 Hydro-Québec customers were affected by the outages; at the height of the storm, early in the night on December 24, some 380,700 homes were without power. Within 63 hours of the service interruption, 85% of customers had been reconnected, thanks in particular to the hard work of the 1,200 workers deployed in the field for a week. By December 27, 93 hours after the peak of the storm, 95% of homes had regained power.
Hydro-Québec workers replaced more than 500 poles and more than 530 transformers. The linemen and women worked the equivalent of 160,000 hours and installed some 63 kilometers of electrical wires. The vast expanse of the territory affected, the prolonged duration of the bad weather and the difficult access to certain intervention zones, which can be reached by snowmobile or snowshoes, complicated their task.
Many of these workers voluntarily postponed their holiday vacations to lend a hand to their colleagues, and this, “in harsh weather conditions”, underlines the state company which thanked its staff in a press release.
“The holiday season is without a doubt one of the worst times of the year to be without electricity. We know that and that’s why we rolled up our sleeves and worked tirelessly until all homes were back on. Our line fitters were present and present once again, not hesitating to make themselves available voluntarily during the holiday season, knowing that our customers needed them and them. I would like to thank our customers for their patience and understanding,” said Hydro-Québec President and CEO Sophie Brochu.
These tens of thousands of additional hours of work will, however, have the effect of postponing planned work in the network for the next few weeks.
The vegetation in question
According to Cendrix Bouchard, of Hydro-Québec’s press relations department, the stability and solidity of the hydroelectric network is not in question.
“We had a lot of mature trees that fell on our infrastructure due to high winds and difficult weather conditions,” he explained. It was a storm that caused a lot of damage. »
Mr. Bouchard also pointed out that in parallel with the network repair work, the workers paid particular attention to the surrounding vegetation, in the most affected areas.
Year in and year out, Hydro-Québec also works to cut branches likely to fall on power lines. Investments in this area have doubled in recent years to reach $100 million in 2022.
Second major event
The winter storm is the second major event to monopolize a large amount of resources at Hydro-Québec in 2022.
The derecho that hit the Laurentians region last May also resulted in a hefty bill of $70 million.
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This dispatch was produced with the financial assistance of the Meta Exchange and The Canadian Press for the news.