Hydro-Quebec crews making headway in aftermath of fierce autumn storm

By Canadian Press

Hydro-Quebec made steady progress restoring power to tens of thousands of customers on Sunday, and maintained hope the vast majority of users would be reconnected by the end of the day.

Crews were working around the clock but repair work was proving complicated in more remote areas, and some customers might remain without hydro for days, the utility said.

Spokesman Francis Labbe said close to 90 per cent of those who'd lost power during Friday's punishing autumn storm were back online.

“We are confident that we'll have most of the affected customers back by the end of the day,” Labbe said. “But obviously, some people will have to wait until Monday to get electricity back and maybe longer depending on the situation.”

Crews have been fixing broken electrical poles and downed lines from the heavy rain and powerful winds of more than 100 kilometres an hour.

“We're getting close to places where the population is more isolated, so accessing the outages is more complicated, and sometimes the work we have to do before we even start to repair the line is major,” Labbe said. “For example, our crews often have to act as lumberjacks before they can even repair the line — lots of branches and trees are down.”

In some areas, entire segments of the system need to be rebuilt while in others, transformers and poles need to be replaced, with equipment being shipped from across the province.

Labbe noted that broken poles can take between five and seven hours to replace.

The utility says nearly 1,200 employees, including 700 line workers, were on the ground and reinforcements have arrived from Michigan, Ontario and the Maritimes. Labbe said those available to help from elsewhere were limited since their own regions were also dealing with outages.

As of noon Sunday, about 139,000 Quebec clients remained without power. But that number has steadily dropped since it peak on Friday, when nearly one million clients were plunged into darkness.

A 63-year-old man in Bromont, Que., 85 kilometres east of Montreal, was killed by a falling tree outside his condominium on Friday.

 

Sidhartha Banerjee, The Canadian Press

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