(Montreal) More than 300,000 Hydro-Québec customers remained without power around 7:30 a.m. Saturday morning, some since Wednesday’s ice storm, but others since the appearance of new blackouts in the wake of the operation to reconnect the teams in the field.
The Montreal region remains the most affected by these blackouts with nearly 191,000 customers waking up without heating or electricity.
The other two regions most affected are those of Laval, on the north shore of Montreal, with more than 29,000 customers in the dark, and in Outaouais, with approximately 28,000 customers affected.
More than 12,000 customers of the government corporation in the Laurentides and Lanaudière regions are still hoping to find electricity again, on the eve of Easter celebrations, a time conducive to family reunions.
A press briefing on the state of the situation is scheduled for Saturday at 9 a.m.
Work is progressing
Despite everything, work is progressing to restore power to Quebec homes and businesses. There were more than a million addresses affected overnight from Wednesday to Thursday.
“More than 400,000 customers have regained electricity today [vendredi]which is in addition to yesterday’s 400,000 [jeudi] “, indicated on Twitter Hydro-Québec, Friday at the end of the evening.
The state-owned company had restored power to around 70% of the 1.1 million homes that were affected by an outage at the height of the crisis.
In a press briefing on Friday afternoon, Premier François Legault said that Hydro-Québec’s objective was for around 95% of residences to be reconnected by Saturday evening.
Friday’s winds, with gusts of up to 75 km/h, however, complicated Hydro-Québec’s task, as tree branches near power lines were already weakened by the ice.
Since Thursday, about 1,400 breakdowns had been added, noted Régis Tellier, vice-president of operations and maintenance for the state-owned company.
On Twitter, Internet users have begun to get impatient, calling on the state-owned company to find out when they will be reconnected.
Hydro-Québec must again take stock of the situation on Saturday morning around 9 a.m. It plans to deploy more than 1,400 people to continue the reconnection efforts on the eve of Easter.
Other death
Prime Minister François Legault was on Friday in Les Coteaux, Montérégie, the day after the death of a resident caused by a falling tree branch.
PHOTO JOSIE DESMARAIS, THE PRESS
François Legault met with municipal authorities and Hydro-Québec employees in Les Coteaux on Friday.
A second death was noted Friday, after a 75-year-old man was found unconscious in his residence in Saint-Joseph-Du-Lac, in the Laurentians.
There was “a generator that worked in the garage,” said Jean-Philippe Labbé, inspector of investigations at the Régie de police du Lac des Deux-Montagnes. Firefighters estimated that there was “20 times more” carbon dioxide in the air than the norm, he said.
The death of the man was declared at the hospital of Saint-Eustache.
Things are better in Châteauguay
In Châteauguay, in Montérégie, there were only 3,150 homes left that were still without electricity on Friday, compared to 16,000 the day before, the municipality said in a press release.
“The level of the river is stable,” she said.
At 6:16 a.m. Saturday, the Hydro-Quebec site indicated that there were only 92 customers without electricity in the municipality.
Accommodation centers
In Montreal and elsewhere, temporary emergency accommodation centers were opened overnight from Thursday to Friday to allow people without electricity to warm up while waiting for the situation to recover.