André Lanctôt is busy this Monday piling up trash all over his land and patching up his roof ripped off by last Saturday’s storm. He is one of hundreds of victims of the storm that killed nine people and deprived tens of thousands of homes of electricity in Ontario and Quebec on Saturday.
From his home in Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines, north of Montreal, Mr. Lanctôt explains how he saw the storm coming from the field in front of him.
“It started, it was dark, but not that dark. […] Then, I saw a brown opaque cloud space, at ground level, the color of the earth, which was just filled with earth. It was coming fast. Suddenly, all my patio furniture lifted and blew away at the same time. I was freaking out. »
His daughter, who had left home a few minutes earlier, called him panicked. The car in front of her had just overturned and the electric poles were collapsing one by one in front of her.
All finally safe and sound, they come out of it with a scare and a summer of renovation ahead of them. “We are used to gales, we are on the plain. But I’ve never seen it so strong. The sound it made. It was scary. »
Once the wind died down a few minutes later, “I saw my neighbor who was coming with his tractor scratching in the street… My roof,” says André Lanctôt. “At the time, I didn’t understand right away. I went out and there I saw that everything had torn off. »
Intense gusts were recorded in several places on Saturday late afternoon, in particular on Lake Memphremagog with a peak of 151 km/h, in Trois-Rivières with peaks at 96 km/h and in Gatineau up to 90 km/h.
Hundreds of trees were uprooted or damaged in several places. In Lanaudière, two schools were damaged by the weather: Sainte-Bernadette school in Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes and Saint-Alphonse school in Saint-Alphonse-Rodriguez.
The connection in progress
At the height of the storm, more than 550,000 homes were plunged into darkness on Saturday evening.
At a press conference Monday morning, the Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, Jonatan Julien, said that 227,000 Hydro-Quebec customers were still without power according to the most recent report available to him. More than 60% of the state company’s customers who lost power over the weekend due to storms and high winds therefore had new access to power.
About 80% of customers deprived of electricity should be connected to the network again by the end of the day, estimated the minister. He specified that the Hydro-Québec teams were supported by colleagues from New Brunswick, and were now entering a more important phase of work, which meant that it took longer to reconnect certain customers to the network.
“It hit it very wide, 100 kilometers wide by 300 kilometers long,” noted the minister. “There are a lot of trees on the infrastructure. It’s much heavier […] There are 15,000 interventions to be made. »
Hydro-Québec reminds you that it is important not to approach electrical wires that have fallen to the ground and that it is preferable to let its teams work.
The cost to Quebecers of this storm will be assessed a posteriori, within a few months.
With The Canadian Press