More than 136,000 Hydro-Québec customers are still without power on Sunday morning following the winter storm that swept across the province this Christmas weekend.
Shortly before 8 a.m., the Crown corporation was still reporting 2,385 outages across Quebec, which meant a dark Christmas morning for 136,880 customers.
The Hydro-Québec teams nevertheless continued to make progress during the night, which enabled some 14,000 customers to regain power.
At the height of the storm, on the night of Friday to Saturday, nearly 380,000 Quebec customers no longer had access to power.
The president and CEO of Hydro-Québec, Sophie Brochu, will hold a new press briefing on Sunday morning, at 11 a.m., to provide an update on the progress of recovery operations.
Hydro-Quebec’s initial goal was to restore power to the majority of customers in time for Christmas Eve on Sunday evening, but Mme Brochu warned on Saturday that it will take “a lot of patience and resilience”, adding that the company was doing everything in its power to work “as quickly as possible”.
Saturday afternoon, the Premier of Quebec, François Legault, underlined in a tweet the work of the Hydro-Quebec teams, who are doing “everything they can to reconnect the most homes, as quickly as possible”. He also praised the efforts of the Ministry of Public Security and invited Quebecers to check in on their loved ones who live alone.
“Be careful on the roads too, the conditions are not ideal. For those who wish to warm up, places are ready to receive you in several cities and municipalities, ”we could read on his Twitter account.