Hydro-Quebec gears up for 'very big weekend' in attempt to restore power to 30,000 homes

Hydro-Québec is aiming to reduce the number of homes still without electricity, a week after deadly storms in Quebec and Ontario, to around 20,000 by Saturday morning.

On Friday morning, more than 43,000 households in the province still had no electricity, the majority of them in the Laurentians.

Of this number, several thousand customers experienced their outage only recently, since last night, due to a few gusts of wind, said Eric Fillion, an executive vice-president at Hydro-Quebec.

"Fortunately, we suspect that it was small trees that touched our wires and affected the networks. This should be fixable more quickly," he said at a press briefing on Friday morning in the Lac Sir-John sector.

As for the initial count of 30,000 customers without electricity for six days, "we hope to bring that to around 20,000 tomorrow morning," said Fillion, speaking alongside Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Jonatan Julien .

"So we still have a very big weekend," he said.

The two other regions most affected by the outages remain the Lanaudière and Outaouais.

Fillion didn't try to skirt the fact that the task is colossal for the 2,000 workers who are currently at work in the field.

To give an example, it will take two days just to resupply around 40 homes in the Lac Sir-John sector, Fillion explained.

"We have trees more than a metre in diameter that have fallen on our lines, which have then torn down poles. We're going to have to clean up the vegetation. We will also have to make poles in the rock," he said.

The rain forecast for Friday could slow down the progress of the work a little, too.

Minister Julien also spoke about the "very, very heavy" obstacles on the roads just to get to the scene of the breakdowns.

"The experience we are currently living is disproportionate to that observed in 2019, which had affected more people," he said. "We're seeing that the nature of the repairs to be made to the network is gigantic."

At a previous press conference, Hydro-Québec had warned that residences that are more isolated or more difficult to access would have to wait until Friday or Saturday for the power supply to be restored.

Julien and Fillion called for the patience of the people affected, also asking them not to do any improvisational electrical work and reminding them to simply stay away from the wires because of the risk of accident.

Separately, Hydro Ottawa says most of the approximately 31,000 Ottawa customers who were still without power on Friday should get it back during the day. However, weather conditions could affect restoration efforts if stronger winds, rains and thunderstorms occur.

Across Ontario, Hydro One is warning that stricken customers in the Bancroft, Perth and Tweed areas are expected to be without power for several more days. About 61,000 Hydro One customers spent Friday night in the dark.

Last Saturday's severe weather caused the deaths of at least 11 people in Ontario and Quebec.

The latest death, reported Thursday, is that of a 58-year-old man who the Ontario Provincial Police say was struck by a falling tree in a remote area of ​​the town of Marmora and Lake.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French on May 27, 2022.