Power still not restored to thousands of customers in Outaouais

Almost all customers in Ottawa and eastern Ontario have their power restored Monday morning following last week's ice storm, but thousands of households in Quebec are still waiting. 

As of 3 p.m. Monday, 4,961 Hydro-Québec customers in the Outaouais were still without power. 

Quebec was hit hardest by power outages, with about 1.1 million Quebec customers without power at the peak of the outage Thursday morning. More than 800,000 customers have had their power restored since, which Hydro-Quebec says is close to 80 per cent of its affected customers.

Across the province, more than 38,000 customers are still in the dark Monday morning, five days after the ice storm. Montréal, Outaouais and Montérégie are among the last regions to have their power restored.

In Chelsea, Que., the Meredith Centre is open until 9 p.m. Monday for anyone who needs to pick up water and recharge electronic devices.

The municipality just outside Ottawa said Monday afternoon that roughly 60 residences were still without power.

Hydro-Québec is warning that some of its remaining repairs to lines damaged by last week's deadly ice storm may not be completed until Tuesday.

Over 200,000 Ottawa customers lost power

Hundreds of thousands of Hydro Ottawa, Hydro One and Hydro-Québec customers were affected by Wednesday's freezing rain. 

At its peak, about 270,000 Hydro Ottawa customers lost their power during Wednesday's freezing rain, said Joseph Muglia, Hydro Ottawa's director of system operations and grid automation.

Hydro Ottawa said it was hoping to restore power to everyone in the city by the end of the day Saturday, but it wasn't until Sunday morning that most customers saw their power come back. 

Repair efforts were being slowed down by falling trees and branches that made conditions too unsafe for crews, Muglia said. 

Clean-up continues in city

Crews are also cleaning up fallen trees, brush and limbs across the city that were downed during the storm.

Alain Gonthier, general manager for the City of Ottawa's public works department, said the city's forestry team has received more than 2,000 calls for service since Wednesday's ice storm, and has serviced more than half of them. 

Gonthier said collecting and chipping all the debris will be a multi-week effort, but people can help by placing their tree cutting and branches at the curb for collection.

Larger tree branches and cuttings can be brought to the city's Trail Road waste facility off Moodie Drive. 

Hydro-Québec needs to bury power lines to minimize future outages, expert says

2 years ago

Duration 3:17

Normand Mousseau is the scientific director of the Trottier Energy Institute at Polytechnique Montréal.