Montreal to close warming shelters after ice storm as Hydro-Québec reconnects pockets of customers

Six days after an ice storm downed trees and cut power to the city, Montreal is closing its warming shelters and says it is switching from emergency mode to "recovery mode." 

But city officials said at a Tuesday afternoon news conference that those still without power can get help by calling 311, or 514-872-0311 if they live in one of the demerged municipalities on the island. 

"If you still have no power we will make sure you're not left behind," said Richard Liebmann, Montreal's fire chief. 

Alain Vaillancourt, the executive committee member responsible for public security, said city workers are continuing to gather fallen branches that litter the city's sidewalks and parks.

The major work of getting trees off of main arteries and away from power lines is done, however, Vaillancourt said. 

"The city is coming back to life," he said. "Spring is here."

But Vaillancourt warned that people enjoying the mild weather in parks should exercise caution and stay on marked paths, away from large trees whose branches may still be fragile from the burden of the ice. 

Hydro-Québec said fewer than 7,000 customers lacked electricity on the island of Montreal by mid-afternoon on Tuesday. 

Many of them were linked to small outages — sometimes fewer than 10 customers — and spread throughout the island, but, according to a Hydro-Québec outage map, they were more concentrated in the West Island and the borough of Côte-des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce. 

Hydro-Québec spokesperson Francis Labbé said all the highly affected regions were places with many mature trees that were weighed down by ice. 

"The damages were very important," he told CBC Montreal's Daybreak. "When a tree falls or beaks and hits our network, there's [only] so much we can do. We just have to rebuild it." 

Oleg Djazovski, a Beaconsfield resident and an electrical engineer at the Canadian Space Agency, was one of those who remained without power on Tuesday, his fifth day without it, he said. 

Djazovski was frustrated by the slow pace of the repairs and enraged because he said he had flagged concerns about a large tree near the power lines but was ignored. That tree fell on the lines last week, severing them and cutting power and internet to Djazovski's home.

It was an ordeal that had him questioning the reliability and resilience of Hydro-Québec's distribution network. 

"It's a problem of poor installation and poor maintenance," he said. "We make reliable products to work in space. What I see here is not acceptable."

Vaillancourt, the city official, said Montreal would be analyzing what went wrong during the outages and looking at ways things could be improved in the future.