(Montreal) Even if Hydro-Québec reached its target on Friday to restore power to more than 85% of its subscribers affected by outages since the violent storms that swept through the province Thursday afternoon, more than 20,000 homes are still without electricity on Saturday morning.
Shortly after 5 a.m. on Saturday, the exact number of customers plunged into darkness was 20,466, but it had risen to 22,126 around 9:15 a.m. This still represents a marked improvement compared to the 217,000 subscribers who were assigned early Friday morning. At the height of the crisis, Thursday evening, 392,000 customers were affected by outages.
On Friday, the state-owned company had set a goal of reconnecting 85% of its affected customers by the end of the day, which it has done — and even exceeded. On Twitter, however, she acknowledged that the situation is not easy for the remaining households, for whom the outage continues.
“As you can see, the storm caused major damage to the vegetation; for example, there are overturned trucks and uprooted trees. The work will continue over the weekend and could continue until the beginning of the week for certain more complex cases or in isolated sectors,” said Hydro-Québec.
The state-owned company noted in passing on Friday that only five outages still in progress were of a duration that exceeded 24 hours.
“We rely on a strike force of more than 800 workers in the field, including fitters, pruners and planting teams. Teams are traveling between regions to expedite recovery,” it added.
Saturday morning, the regions of Lanaudière and Montérégie remained the regions hardest hit by the outages with more than 8,000 customers affected. In Montreal, nearly 9,900 households were still without access to power.
In total, Hydro-Québec teams still have to work to repair more than 550 breakdowns throughout the territory.
On Thursday, the steamroller of severe thunderstorms and even tornadoes moved about 450 kilometers from south of Ottawa to Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pérade, halfway between Trois- Rivers and Quebec.
All affected areas received rainfall amounts varying between 50 and 90 millimetres, which caused sewer overflows and extensive flooding in several municipalities.
In Montreal, the City said Friday that it had received in some places 88 millimeters of rain in less than two hours Thursday afternoon, almost the amount it receives on average in the whole month of July (91 mm) .