2023-10-08 15:06:26
As of early Sunday evening, 1,514 Hydro-Québec customers were still without electricity in the region.
The MRC of Témiscouata still had more than 700 homes without electricity. In Rivière-du-Loup, more than 300 customers were also still waiting to be reconnected.
More than 400 homes were also still without electricity in the MRC of Kamouraska, while power had been restored earlier to those in Rimouski-Neigette.
Power was also restored to the more than 2,000 homes which had lost electricity in the followingnoon in the MRC of La Matapédia, the vast majority in Amqui.
At the height of the outages, Sunday morning, 12,680 Hydro-Québec customers were without electricity in Bas-Saint-Laurent, the majority of whom were in Rimouski.
The weather conditions involved
The state company confirms that the outages are linked to the strong winds that blew in the region, with gusts of up to 70 km/h.
Its spokesperson, Mathieu Côté, indicates that falling tree branches are often the cause of equipment breakdown. He adds, however, that Hydro-Québec has carried out numerous pruning work to control the vegetation around the power lines.
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Vegetation near electrical wires can represent a potential hazard in the event of a fire or outage.
Photo : Radio-Canada / Isabelle Damphousse
The state-owned company plans to complete work on the region’s electricity network next year.
We do maintenance regularly. You should know that we have over 110,000 km of power lines in Quebec, so it’s a lot, but we spend a lot of time and money to control the vegetation under these lines, explains -he.
Mathieu Côté also affirms that Hydro-Québec had prepared in anticipation of the weather conditions that were announced by Environment Canada.
We had recalled several teams who were ready to intervene throughout Eastern Quebec. They have been hard at work since early this morning in order to restore service to as many customers as quickly as possible, he describes.
With the collaboration of Gabriel Paré-Asatoory, Coralie Mensa and Isabelle Damphousse
1696808699
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