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Around 2,550 Hydro-Québec customers without power as cold snap abates

Sunday evening's total was down from about 18,000 Saturday afternoon.

Vapour rises off Lac St-Louis obscuring the Mercier Bridge on a bitterly cold and windy day in Montreal, Friday February 3, 2023.
Vapour rises off Lac St-Louis obscuring the Mercier Bridge on a bitterly cold and windy day in Montreal, Friday February 3, 2023. Photo by John Mahoney /Montreal Gazette

There were 2,556 Hydro-Québec customers still without power Sunday at 7:30 p.m., down from about 18,000 Saturday afternoon.

The two-day cold snap caused outages throughout the province, mostly because heating systems placed great demands on the network, said Hydro spokesperson Maxime Gagné. Quebec set a record for electricity consumption on Friday and the utility had to purchase power from Ontario and New York state.

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The extreme cold was also a challenge for the teams working to restore power, Gagné said.

The lion’s share of the customers still without power Sunday — 1,709 — were in Montreal, which had more affected households than elsewhere in the province. The figure was down considerably Sunday evening, from more than 6,100 Saturday afternoon.

Montreal is more densely populated than other regions of the province, Gagné pointed out, and many clients are on the same line. Transformers were affected and, in some cases, power line explosions sparked fires and caused damage to hydro poles.

By Sunday, all the outages had been assigned to teams and were in the process of being repaired, he said, and it was expected that power would be restored before Monday.

sschwartz@postmedia.com

  1. Vapour rising off the water partially obscures the skyline on a bitterly cold and windy day in Montreal on Friday, Feb. 3, 2023.

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