Hydro-Québec aims to restore power to 95% of households by Saturday evening, but some customers could wait until Monday before finding heating and light in their homes. The death of a second person since the start of the ice storm was also announced on Friday, while Montreal Public Health expressed concern about an increase in carbon monoxide poisoning.
First of all, 80% of households will find electricity by Friday evening. The breakdowns will then be repaired in 95% of homes by Saturday evening, Quebec Premier François Legault said on Friday, calling for “patience”. For the remaining 5%, “unfortunately, it will go to a little later,” he said during a press briefing held in Montérégie. “We hope it will be resolved quickly. »
At 9:30 p.m. Friday, Hydro-Québec reported 307,312 customers still without electricity in the province, more than half of whom live on the island of Montreal. By Thursday morning, at the height of the power outages, that number was over a million.
“The news is, I think, quite good,” said the Minister of Economy, Innovation and Energy, Pierre Fitzgibbon, as part of a press briefing held Friday in Montreal.
The vagaries of the weather could, however, complicate the work of the 1,400 employees of the state company deployed in the field – mainly in the greater Montreal area – to restore power to customers without electricity.
“Today, the temperature is mild, but there are still winds at 50, 70, 75 kilometers per hour, gusts. So we will still see if it will have an impact on the creation of new outages, ”noted Friday the vice-president of operations and maintenance of Hydro-Québec, Régis Tellier. Thus, some people could have access to electricity again only on Sunday, or even Monday, he said.
“I know that Quebecers are able to help each other, now is the time to do so,” said Mr. Legault, inviting people who have electricity to host those who do not or to bring them hot meals.
A second death
While traveling to the Coteaux, Mr. Legault also asked Quebecers to remain “cautious”, particularly with regard to the risks of carbon monoxide poisoning. A 75-year-old man from Saint-Joseph-du-Lac died Friday morning. 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.
It is the second fatality since Wednesday’s ice storm. On Thursday, a 60-year-old man died after being crushed by a branch. “Let’s be careful to [éviter] that there are other deaths, ”said Mr. Legault.
Earlier in the day, Public Health called for vigilance, indicating that there have been around sixty cases of poisoning in the past few hours, which has had the effect of inflating the occupancy rate of several emergencies. , which exceeded 200% in some places on Friday.
A revived debate
The ice storm that plunged more than a million Quebecers into darkness on Wednesday evening has also revived – once again – the debate on the relevance of burying the Hydro-Québec distribution network. An option that François Legault rejected out of hand on Thursday, saying that such an operation would cost “about 100 billion” dollars. “You have to be realistic,” he said during a press briefing.
However, “nobody says that it should be all the wires in Quebec” which should be buried, retorts the scientific director of the Trottier Energy Institute at Polytechnique Montreal, Normand Mousseau. The latter estimates that the percentage of buried electrical wires could gradually increase in the province without entailing exorbitant expenses, if everything is well planned by the public authorities.
“We’ve been refusing to do it for decades. We are opening the streets in Montreal to redo the aqueducts, the sewer circuits, ”but we keep the electric poles in these places, notes the expert. However, “when you open the street, put the wires in the basement, it does not entail major costs”. “It takes coordination between Hydro-Québec and the cities, that they work together” so that the development of these territories is carried out with a view to burying more and more electric wires in the province, underlines Mr. Foam.
Currently, between 10% and 15% of the entire Hydro-Québec distribution network is buried. On the island of Montreal, about 50% of the electrical wires — totaling 4,000 kilometers — are buried, but the situation varies greatly from one area of the city to another. In the linked city of Westmount, which has been largely spared by the power outages that have hit the metropolis since Wednesday evening, this rate of burying wires reaches around 70%.
Developers are increasingly opting for burying electrical wires in their real estate projects, notes Concordia University engineering professor and energy specialist Andreas Athienitis. A measure that eliminates the impact on the urban landscape that the installation of electric poles can have, in addition to reducing the risk of power outages, a significant part of which in the province is caused by falling branches and of trees on the Hydro-Quebec distribution network, notes the expert.