An electrical transformer caught fire on Thursday evening at the Hertel substation in La Prairie, Montérégie.
The fire released a large plume of black smoke and required the intervention of firefighters.
Despite the incident, no power failure was reported by Hydro-Québec.
“The power demand was carried over to other devices. There was no impact on the other devices,” said a spokesperson for Hydro-Québec, Francis Labbé, assuring that no customer saw their electricity supply disrupted by the fire.
The cause of the disaster remained mysterious in the evening. Hydro-Québec intended to let the firefighters do their job before starting its investigation.
This new setback comes at the end of a week to forget for the state-owned company, which had to reconnect more than 1.1 million customers since last Thursday due to the ice storm.
The Hydro-Québec website has also been down since the beginning of the day due to a “denial of service” attack carried out by hackers, probably Russians, like many websites of government organizations or national interest across the country.
