Bad luck continues to befall Gatineau residents who have experienced two floods in recent years and many of whom are still without power due to the ice storm that hit Quebec on Wednesday.
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“There, we cross our fingers so that the river does not rise”, said Fatima Pereira, raising her voice to be heard in the hum of the generators.
Fearing a third flood in six years, Mr.me Pereira has already hooked up her sump pumps to generators while another powers the house.
“We got used to it,” she said, smirking.
The Sports Center to the rescue
The administration of Mayor France Bélisle has opened the Gatineau Sports Center to those who are still without power. Several dozen people found refuge there on Thursday.
A Frenchwoman, Mina Tami, has a good heart against bad luck.
“So far it’s fine, because it gives us a bit of a detox from electrical appliances, so we brought out the games,” said the mother of two children.
“Our new friends invite us to cook at their place. There is really mutual aid, it’s magnificent.
A good neighborhood
Met in front of her house in the Lucerne district, Marie-Josée Cléroux was in good spirits despite the lack of electricity, the good neighbors helping.
“Yesterday we had our grandchildren who came to sleep with us, they are one and a half and three years old. They came to sleep with grandpa and grandma during the week,” she said.
Same story in the district of Deschênes, a few minutes by car, where Cindy Graveline was talking with her neighbor about the breakdown that affected the sector on Wednesday afternoon.
“We took out the coloring books!”, Launched the mother of 4 children, who took advantage of the lack of electricity to bring out the barbecue a little earlier than expected.
A region affected, again
The Outaouais is one of the regions hardest hit by bad weather.
In a press briefing, Mayor France Bélisle advised citizens to “equip themselves for the next 72 hours”.
Around 4 p.m. Thursday, some 100,000 customers had still not been reconnected, out of a total of 227,000, and nearly 60,000 Gatineau households out of 145,000 were still waiting to be able to turn on the light again.
Federal government offices were not spared. In an email, the Treasury Board confirmed that 22 government buildings were still closed in the Federal Capital Region as of 5 p.m. Thursday.
The entire National Capital Commission (NCC) park system was closed Thursday, and could remain so for several more days, the organization said in an email.
“Several trees and tree branches have fallen on the trails and will have to be removed when access to the network is safe for our teams,” we said.
The city of Gatineau has experienced its share of bad weather in recent years.
Part of the city was flooded in 2017 and 2019, while a tornado devastated several neighborhoods in 2018.