‘Major work’ needed to restore power to some Quebecers after Saturday’s storms

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The number of Hydro-Québec customers without power dropped steadily on Monday, but tens of thousands of people remained without electricity in the aftermath of violent storms that tore through southern Ontario and Quebec on Saturday, causing massive damage and killing at least 10 people.

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A 51-year-old Quebecer died when the boat she was in capsized in the Ottawa River in Gatineau. Eight deaths in Ontario, most involving people crushed by falling trees or branches, were announced on Saturday. A ninth person in Ontario was killed Sunday by a falling branch, and on Monday Peterborough police reported the death of a 10th from injuries suffered during the fast-moving storms.

The storms toppled hydro poles and transmission towers, uprooted trees and ripped shingles and siding from houses. In Quebec City, part of the roof on a 72-unit condominium was carried off Saturday evening by the wind.

At the height of the storms, more than 550,000 Hydro-Québec customers were without electricity. By 9 pm Monday, more than 149,000 customers were still without power.

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About 1,200 workers in 600 teams were on the ground working to restore power on Monday — mainly Hydro-Québec crews, but also contractors, crews from municipal networks including Hydro-Joliette and Hydro-Sherbrooke, and 40 teams from New Brunswick. The aim was to restore electricity by the end of Monday to 80 per cent of Quebecers who had lost it, Caroline Des Rosiers, a spokesperson for the utility, said Monday morning.

She warned it could take time before service is restored to the remaining 20 per cent of customers.

“More major work” will be required to re-establish power for some customers, Quebec Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Jonatan Julien said Monday. Many of those customers are in wooded areas and access was a challenge, he said.

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Saturday’s violent storms affected a strip of land 300 km long and 100 km wide — a breadth rarely seen, said Régis Tellier, vice-president of operations and maintenance at Hydro-Québec.

He said it had been a decade since he saw a storm of such magnitude, “with so much damage.”

“The winds, the gusts, blew at speeds of 150 and 160 km per hour. With such strong winds, the infrastructure does not hold,” he said Monday, speaking with Julien at a press conference.

High winds were recorded late Saturday afternoon in places around Quebec, notably on Lake Memphremagog with gusts as high as 151 km/h, in Trois-Rivières (up to 96 km/h) and in Gatineau (90 km/h).

“The storms were set off by a cold front sweeping in, slicing through the heat and humidity that was in place. This resulted in torrential rainfall, hail, frequent lightning and damaging wind gusts,” the Weather Network stated Monday.

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The Montreal area was spared by the storms, which moved from Ontario to the regions of Outaouais, the Laurentians and Lanaudière, and from the Mauricie to the Capitale-Nationale regions by the end of Saturday afternoon. The Eastern Townships and Chaudière-Appalaches regions of Quebec were affected by a second storm cell at about 3 am Sunday.

“We are accustomed to seeing branches and sections of trees, but this time there were tree trunks of 50 and 60 centimetres” knocked down by the storms, Tellier said.

That complicates access to the sites of power outages, because the roads may be blocked, he said.

In Quebec, the storms were at their worst in three regions, said Des Rosiers: the Laurentians, Lanaudière and the Outaouais — all heavily treed regions.

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Two schools were damaged in the Lanaudière region; in the Outaouais, several residents of Fassett posted photos on social media of the collapsed bell tower of the St-Fidèle de Fassett church.

Hydro-Québec trims trees and branches around power lines and elsewhere in its network, but the fact that so many trees were damaged or uprooted and that so many branches fell could not have been predicted, Des Rosiers said.

“And that makes it difficult not only to repair the outage, but to access the place we need to get to in order to restore the power.”

And until they can physically access the location of a power outage, it is impossible for repair crews to know what caused the outage — a failed line, a downed tree or something else.

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Quebecers were reminded Monday by Julien and Tellier not to approach failed electrical wires or transformers.

In Ontario, the Hydro One utility, the province’s largest electricity provider, said damage included more than 1,000 broken poles and as many downed power lines, along with countless trees and large branches causing power outages.

The utility reported that although crews had restored power to more than 380,000 customers, about 185,000 were still without power as of Monday afternoon.

Presse Canadienne contributed to this report.

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