During the cold weather in early February, more than 1,100 customers lost power
Officials in the Pontiac area say they will keep pushing Hydro-Québec to find a long-term solution after an outage during a brutal cold snap in early February left hundreds of customers without power.
On February 4 and 5, people in L’Isle-aux-Allumettes, Chichester, and Sheenboro, all in western Quebec, were without power for more than 30 hours.
During that time, the temperature went down to about –40 C. During the worst of the blackout, more than 1,100 people couldn’t turn on their lights. Some of them also didn’t have phones or internet.
“Our citizens are quite angry, I’ve got to say,” said L’Isle-aux-Allumettes Mayor Corey Spence. “To stay warm, people had to spend the night in their cars. They lost their jobs and had to pay for generators.”
Politicians in the area say that Upper Pontiac’s power situation has been a problem for a long time.
The system is at the end of the line of hydronetworks. Québec’s Since the area is so close to the Ontario border, its power system is synchronized with that of Ontario. It can also be synchronized with the electricity network in Quebec, but Spence says Hydro-Québec has told him that the situation in Ontario is more stable.
Hydro-Québec also buys power from the generating stations at Waltham and Chutes-Coulonge, which are owned by the company Evolugen.
It says that it has answers
Spence and other people from the area met with Hydro-Québec last week to talk about what’s been done to make sure something like what happened in February doesn’t happen again.
In a March 1 news release, the power company said that the early February outage was caused by “events” on Ontario’s power grid that it couldn’t explain and that it couldn’t get to either the Waltham or Chute-Coulonge stations.
At the same time, Quebec was using a lot of electricity because it was so cold, so they couldn’t get power there either.
To stay warm, people had to spend the night in their cars.– L’Isle-aux-AllumettesCorey Spence is mayor.
Hydro-Québec said it now has a plan to send power from Quebec to the sector if there is a problem on the Ontario side.
It also said that it has added connections to let power come from generators in case of a blackout and raised the threshold on one of the lines so that more power can be moved.
The power company has also promised to improve how quickly it can respond to power outages in the future.
A lack of fait
Spence said he was cautiously optimistic after the meeting.
He said, “I’d like to work with Hydro-Québec to make sure our network is strong.” “But at the same time, I will fight for my citizens to make sure they get what they deserve.”
The MNA for Pontiac, André Fortin, said he will also keep pushing for better service.
“I’m still asking for the Upper Pontiac to be connected to the rest of the Hydro-Québec grid, and I think the local officials are as well,” he said. “That way, they can get the same level of service as everyone else in the province.”
“People in the community are traumatized when things like this happen.” At this point, they don’t really trust Hydro-Québec.
In the coming months, Hydro-Québec and the people in charge of the area will meet again.