Number of customers without power in National Capital Region drops below 100K
Customers across the region have been dealing with outages since Wednesday
Tens of thousands of customers remain without power in the National Capital Region Friday after Wednesday's ice storm, although the number continues to gradually drop.
As of 5 p.m. Friday:
- Roughly 8,500 Hydro Ottawa customers don't have power.
- 40,497 Hydro-Québec customers in the Outaouais don't have power.
- 46,914 Hydro One customers in eastern Ontario don't have power.
Hundreds of thousands of Hydro Ottawa, Hydro One and Hydro-Québec customers were affected in some way by Wednesday's freezing rain.
Barring any further weather issues, power is expected to be restored to everyone in Ottawa by the end of the day Saturday, Hydro Ottawa said.
In a statement Friday afternoon, Hydro Ottawa said it had about 225 work crews trying to restore power to anyone still in the dark.
Those crews would be out Friday evening and overnight, the power utility said.
"This is a multi-day event, I want to stress that ... it's slow-moving, it's very organic," said Joseph Muglia, Hydro Ottawa's director of system operations and grid automation, on Thursday morning.
"We experienced one of the most devastating ice storms since 1998."
Still working on major storm resiliency, preparedness
Repair efforts were slowed down by lightning and falling trees and branches that made conditions too unsafe for crews, Muglia said.
As of Thursday, a full complement of workers is on the ground, supplemented by contractors and staff from other jurisdictions.
The ice storm comes not quite a year after the powerful May 2022 derecho wind storm, which caused the worst damage Hydro Ottawa had seen across the city in decades. Since then the utility has been working on its storm preparedness and resiliency, and Muglia said that will continue to be a big focus throughout 2023.
"We're all seeing that these major events, that are supposed to be like 100-year storms, are happening a month apart or three months apart. And so it's been a very quick learning curve for us to make sure that we've got our resilience in place, our people are able to be refreshed and get ready for the next storm.
"So we're working on that. We're working on our infrastructure, we're working on our storm hardening."
Some in the Outaouais facing longer outages
At a news conference Friday morning, Régis Tellier, vice-president of operations and maintenance at Hydro-Québec, said the company hopes to restore power to 800,000 customers across the province by the end of the day.
About 1.1 million Quebecers were without power Thursday morning at the peak of the outage.
Power restoration work was progressing well Friday afternoon in Gatineau, said Caroline Milliard, Hydro-Québec spokesperson for the Outaouais.
Still, people in "more remote" areas of the Pontiac and Les Collines-de-l'Outaouais might have to wait a few more days for the lights to come back on, she said.
"This is a long weekend for many people, [but] it won't be a holiday for our teams," Milliard told Radio-Canada. "They are on the ground. They are working as fast as they can to restore the power."