” I’m sad. »
In an emotional moment, that’s all the lady behind the counter manages to articulate. His small convenience store located on Park Avenue, near Laurier Avenue, in Mile-End, has been closed for four days. Sunday, due to the milder weather, it is open to customers who can pay, provided they have cash.
It will soon be four full days since the premises no longer have access to electricity. For the owner, who does not wish to give her name for professional reasons, this breakdown is much more than a simple inconvenience.
“I ordered $1,000 worth of ice cream last week: I lost everything. In total, my losses are $3,000,” she explains to the Duty pointing to the small freezer in which she normally stores ice cream cones.
It is now filled with bags of ice under which she buried frozen food in the hope that they would not melt. But it’s a waste of time: we discern a Mr Freeze orange that has gone liquid and a frozen pasta dish that is now all soft.
“All the customers went to the convenience store next door. If I close for a few days, customers get used to somewhere else,” she laments, saying she has hardly ever closed her business in 15 years. “I work seven days a week.”
Since Wednesday evening, she has not been able to open her convenience store. “It was too cold the first few days. And I’m too scared, because there are no more cameras or alarms working, and I work alone all the time. »
His eldest daughter arrives in the meantime with some boiling water to heat up instant noodles. “This convenience store is the only source of income for my mother and her three children,” she explains to the Duty.
The owner of the convenience store is not angry with Hydro-Québec. “Everyone works hard,” she says. However, times are tough. She can’t hold back a few tears when she talks about the fatigue and stress she’s been experiencing since the start of this blackout, which cost her business thousands of dollars.
crowded sidewalks
If tens of thousands of Montrealers were still affected by the breakdowns, Sunday afternoon, others had already relegated this episode to the stage of bad memory. On this sunny Sunday in April, many passers-by strolled in a good mood in the Plateau-Mont-Royal and Mile-End neighborhoods, hard hit by power outages in the past week.
“I lost electricity for almost three days,” says Hachimi Kelil, met at Laurier Park, which has become a cemetery of fallen tree branches during the ice storm. “Friends offered to put me up, but I preferred to stay at home. I had to go to the library to recharge my phone,” explains the Plateau-Mont-Royal resident.
A little further on, Amel Jaloul and Guillaume Trautmann are sipping coffee in the sun, seated at a picnic table. Recently arrived from France, they did not flinch in the face of this extreme climatic episode. “I lost electricity for 30 hours, but I found that there was a lot of mutual aid”, underlines Guillaume, referring to the refuges offered to people who no longer have power.
“At the start, I thought that the ice was normal here”, says Amel with amusement. “I was told that there was a lot of snow and extreme temperatures in Quebec. But at work on Wednesday, when my Quebec colleagues started to freak out, I understood that it was not normal, ”she laughs.
Open grocery stores
Due to prolonged outages, grocery stores in six regions have been given the opportunity to open their doors despite the Easter holiday. “Saturday, immediately after the minister’s announcement, I picked up the phone and asked employees to come in,” says a manager of a Metro grocery store who cannot identify himself, since he does not is not an official spokesperson for the channel.
“I felt a little bad. We only have five statutory holidays in the year. A dozen employees nevertheless answered the call. “We didn’t run out of electricity, but we ran out of internet. The next orders will be placed only on Tuesday and will arrive on Thursday,” he notes. He fears that the shelves are empty. “As other nearby grocery stores have run out of electricity, we have more customers and they buy more. »
Met in the dairy products aisle, Marie-Laurence and Nicolas were without electricity for around 24 hours, but did not lose any food. “We put snow in the fridge and in the refrigerator and everything remained frozen”, they explain. The young couple agree on the relevance of opening the grocery stores on this Easter holiday. “Our generation doesn’t really celebrate Easter, so it surprises me to see businesses closed,” says Marie-Laurence.