Utility crews in Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick were still working Tuesday to restore power to thousands of people on dark days after vicious winter storms last week knocked out power.
As of late afternoon, about 25,000 Hydro-Québec customers and about 5,000 Hydro One customers were still without power.
New Brunswick Power had restored power to most residents affected by the storm, which it said caused one of the largest power outages across the province in 25 years.
The utility’s outage map showed that 77 customers were still affected.
Hydro-Québec said 95 percent of customers had power restored since the extreme weather began on Friday.
He said he had 1,300 field staff working on the problem and that teams from stabilized regions would go to the hardest-hit areas.
Denis Lavoie, a resident of Quebec’s Laurentian region north of Montreal, said he felt increasingly abandoned after nearly five days without power.
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Instead of seeing his children and grandchildren for Christmas, he and his wife stayed at home cooking hamburgers on a propane stove.
He said the estimated repair time for his Mont-Tremblant home on Hydro-Québec’s website kept changing, questioning why power couldn’t be restored more quickly.
“24 or 36 hour cuts, I can understand that,” he said. “But not 106 hours in winter.”
Thousands of Canadians still in the dark days after ferocious storms knocked out power. #WinterStorms #Power Outages
Lavoie bought a generator earlier this year that gave him some electricity, but he said he feels Hydro-Québec should reimburse customers for the long outage, which so far had cost him nearly $200 in gasoline and wood.
On Monday, Hydro-Québec CEO Sophie Brochu acknowledged customer frustration with inaccurate estimated timelines on Hydro-Québec’s website, saying crews sometimes discover more problems once they arrive at the scene.
Brochu said it was difficult to provide an accurate estimate of when power would be restored for customers still affected due to the complexity of the remaining jobs.
While he said the “vast majority” of the blackouts will be resolved by Wednesday, he couldn’t promise that all the lights would be back on by New Year’s Eve.
“No one will be forgotten,” he said. “We will have no surrender or peace until everyone is connected again.”
Jacob Walker and his partner were staying at his mother’s residence, a 45-minute drive from Quebec City, following a power outage on the morning of December 23.
The couple lives in the Charlesbourg district of the capital, and Walker said Tuesday the status to restore power at Hydro-Québec’s request was “undetermined.”
“The first day we handled the situation very well. We kept the refrigerator and freezer closed. We also tried to keep the doors closed as much as possible to keep the cold air out and we took out all the blankets,” Walker said. .
“By the second night, it was freezing cold. It was 9C inside our apartment. At that point, I told my partner to go away and she ended up sleeping at a friend’s house.”
The couple’s two cats also had to be relocated on the third day without power.
“The apartment was no longer habitable, so I went with my partner and we went to stay at my mother’s house,” he said.
The temporary relocation has created additional expenses for Walker in the form of transportation costs and food spoilage.
“We tried to give away as much food as we could to friends, but there were still losses, and with inflation right now, it’s not good for us,” Walker said.
Prime Minister François Legault said on Twitter that he could understand the frustration of hydroelectric customers who lost power.
He thanked Hydro-Québec linemen and other public sector workers who worked during and after the storm, adding that the utility was doing everything possible to reconnect everyone’s power by Wednesday.
-With archives of Morgan Lowrie and Marisela Amador in Montreal
This report by The Canadian Press was first published on December 27, 2022.
This story was produced with the financial assistance of Meta and the Canadian Press News Fellowship.