(Montreal) The restoration of electricity service was slow Friday morning in Quebec for the tens of thousands of customers who were still deprived of it.
At 8:00 a.m., nearly 207,000 Hydro-Québec subscribers still had no electricity due to the elements that had raged during the previous hours. This means that in three hours on Friday, power had been restored to around 10,000 customers in the various affected regions.
The state-owned company explained that the number of breakdowns remained high Friday morning, at 1,198, including nearly 400 in Montérégie. Repairing some of them could sometimes restore power to only a handful of subscribers, even if the time required for the repair was the same as for outages affecting more customers.
The Montreal region remained the most affected at 8 a.m. with more than 85,600 customers without electricity, followed by Montérégie with around 70,000 subscribers. Many addresses were also without electricity in Lanaudière (31,000), in Laval (5,300), in the Laurentians (just under 5,300) and in the Capitale-Nationale (just over 1,800).
At the end of the day, Thursday, Hydro-Québec confirmed that most of the outages had been caused by weather events and were no longer related to the forest fires in James Bay, as was the case earlier in the day. This situation in the northern zone mainly affected the Montreal region, depriving nearly 540,000 of its subscribers of power.
The state-owned company said Thursday it could take 24 to 48 hours to restore power to all affected customers. Poles were snapped, wires were knocked to the ground, and broken trees fell on equipment.