Nearly 500K Hydro-Quebec customers lose power, service largely restored

Hydro-Quebec says it is investigating a "loss of production" on its power grid Tuesday, which caused widespread blackouts across the province.

Nearly half a million customers lost power at the height of the outage during the early afternoon. Of the 498,000 customers who lost electricity, more than 140,000 were on the Island of Montreal. Other hard-hit areas were the Montérégie region, the Laurentians and Laval.

• See the Hydro-Quebec outages map here

The outage map on the Hydro-Quebec website shows most of the blackouts are in the Montreal area. (Source: hydroquebec.com)

Power was starting to come back for some customers shortly after the outages started, though many still do not have electricity.

Hydro-Quebec spokesperson Caroline Desrosiers said the Crown corporation does not yet know what caused the power grid to fail, but teams are looking into it.

In a tweet, Hydro-Quebec said the loss of production happened at the Churchill Falls power station, which triggered a protective mechanism to cut power.

"Please note that you do not have to report the outage via the Info-pannes service and that the estimated delays by Info-pannes are not applicable in this type of outage since there is no work to be done on the distribution network," the tweet said.

Newfoundland and Labrador power serivce NLHydro also tweeted, saying, "During maintenance this afternoon, an issue at Churchill Falls resulted in a loss of supply affecting customers in Quebec. All units are back online. The incident is under investigation."

As of 3:30 p.m., there were less than 20,000 clients without electricity, including 18,500 in the Montérégie, and just 375 in Montreal.

LISTEN ON CJAD 800 RADIO: Hydro-Quebec provides update on flash outages across the province

Under a 1969 agreement, Hydro-Quebec can purchase 85 per cent of the electricity generated by the Churchill Falls hydroelectric dam. As of 2019, the deal had yielded close to $28 billion in profits to Quebec, and about $2 billion for Newfoundland and Labrador.
 

It has been a difficult month for the Quebec utility after an April 5 ice storm hit the province, knocking out power to 1.1 million customers -- some for as long as a week.
 

As well, the provincially-owned utility was hit two weeks ago with a cyberattack that knocked off-line its website and mobile application, with a pro-Russian hacker group claiming responsibility.

 

- With files from The Canadan Press