Temperatures are expected to fall by about 10 to 15 degrees over the course of a few hours as a vigorous cold front sweeps across the province Wednesday evening.
Published Feb 28, 2024 • Last updated 6 hours ago • 2 minute read
High wind and rain leave Montrealers drenched in November 2022.Photo by Dave Sidaway /Montreal Gazette
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More than 240,000 Hydro-Québec customers were without power Wednesday night amid high winds, the utility said.
Just over 48,000 Montreal-area customers had lost power by around 11 p.m., along with 9,000 in Laval and almost 20,000 in Lanaudière. The hardest-hit region was the Montérégie on the South Shore, with around 62,000 customers in the dark.
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“Things have escalated fairly quickly in the past hour,” Hydro-Québec spokesperson Louis-Olivier Batty told the Gazette around 7:30 p.m. “It’s really the winds that are causing this — the winds and the branches.”
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It was too early to know if fallen branches had caused significant damages to power lines, Batty added.
There were 94 separate outages on the island of Montreal as of 10:50 p.m., according to Hydro-Québec.
The power outages also brought Réseau express métropolitain trains to a stop, operators of the light-rail network said in a message on the X social media platform just after 7:30 p.m. It wasn’t clear when service would resume. Shuttle buses were to be deployed.
Interruption – Une panne d’alimentation électrique cause une interruption de service sur le réseau. L’heure de reprise est pour l’instant indéterminée.
Des navettes d’autobus seront disponibles.Pour connaître l’emplacement des autobus, consultez le https://t.co/LvY1hvQyV7
— Réseau Express Métropolitain (@REM_infoservice) February 29, 2024
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Environment Canada is forecasting high westerly winds up to 90 kilometres per hour in the Montreal area Wednesday night. Temperatures are expected to fall by about 10 to 15 degrees in a few hours as a “vigorous” cold front sweeps across the province.
Hydro-Québec has set itself the goal of reducing the number of power failures by 35 per cent over the next seven to 10 years as climate change puts its power grid to the test. It’s aiming to start with a one per cent reduction in 2024.
Last year was one of the 15 worst years ever for the utility in terms of outages.
Hydro-Québec announced in November that it planned to invest $45 billion to $50 billion through 2035 to improve the reliability of its grid. That represents an annual expenditure of between $4 billion and $5 billion — almost double the amounts spent in recent years.
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