By Canadian Press

About 19K Quebec hydro customers still without power almost 1 week after storm

Dec 28, 2022 | 8:11 AM

MONTREAL — Nearly 19,000 Hydro-Québec customers are still without power this morning, after a winter storm slammed Eastern Canada last week.

The public utility’s outage map shows more than 5,700 clients without electricity in the Quebec City area, nearly 5,000 in the Côte-Nord region and more than 2,400 in Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean.

Hydro-Québec’s CEO said earlier this week that many of the remaining outages are complex to fix, affect few customers, and may require crews to use snowshoes or snowmobiles to reach the lines.

The utility has promised that the vast majority of customers would have their power restored by the end of today, but it has also said it couldn’t provide an end date for all the outages.

An auditor general’s report in December found Hydro-Québec’s service has become less reliable and that the provincial Crown corporation isn’t fully equipped to handle the challenges of an aging grid. 

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But CEO Sophie Brochu said that it was extreme weather — not weaknesses in the grid — that caused hundreds of thousands of Quebecers to lose power at the height of the storm that began in the province Dec. 23.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 28, 2022.

The Canadian Press