He explained that the record had been in his sights for the last several months, noting that four monthly records were broken in 2019, including February with five outages, July with 22, October with 13 and December with 16.

“I knew this earlier in the year because we had broken the record in February and we had broken the record in July,” he said. “So, I knew right away that at that point, by July, we were likely going to set a new record for the year.”

“Based on the data I had, I figured it could be over 100,” he added. “I guess that’s the way it worked out.”

Allumettes Island is served by two different electrical distribution lines. One is called 224, which serves Chapeau, Chichester and Sheenboro. The rest of the island – most of it – is served by Waltham-221.

Gillespie has compiled the data regarding power outages on Waltham-221 for the last 11 years.

With Waltham-221 serving people in multiple municipalities in the region as well as Pembroke, Gillespie stressed that the problem has spread beyond only affecting Allumettes Island residents.

“It’s the whole Upper Pontiac,” he said. “It’s no-longer just our line here. It’s clear that there are repercussions from all these outages. It’s the same for the bank. It’s the same for a lot of businesses. It’s a nuisance. After a while, they can’t even use their system for credit cards and debit cards.”

According to Director General of the Caisse Desjardins in Chapeau, Stephane Labine, the outages are having a negative impact on his business. He explained that every time the power goes out at the bank, employees need to completely reboot their information systems, which can sometimes take up to a half hour.

“Our information systems our connected to a network and when the network stops working it takes a certain delay for the information systems to link back up with the network,” he said. “Whether it’s a five second outage or 20 seconds, one minute or two, it closes our services at our registers … which cause a significant loss of productivity.”

For Labine, the outages have been especially frustrating because they’ve caused dissatisfaction among customers.

He noted that they directly affect his employees as well, who on many occasions have been forced to work over-time hours to make up for lost productivity.

“I haven’t numbered an exact sum in dollars to measure the impact,” he said. “But the outages force employees to get over-whelmed. For sure, we’re absorbing this. But there are human impacts as well as impacts on financial resources since our employees need to do over-time. For sure there are impacts.

For this year, Labine said that he’s looking for outages to be reduced as much as possible and that Hydro Quebec should notify residents and businesses in times when outages will occur to give them time to prepare.

“We’re hoping this can get solved as much as possible,” he said. “Maybe it’s not a situation that can be dealt with 100 per cent. But the less outages the better.”

“Seldom do I receive a call telling me there’s going to be an outage,” he added. “Most of the time, I don’t receive any calls and we’re not advised. Sometimes, maybe we could have outages in moments when we’re not in operations. That’s what I’d like to see in 2020.”

At the MRC Pontiac’s council of mayors meeting held back in August, Mayor of Chichester Donald Gagnon put forward a resolution requesting explanations from Hydro Quebec regarding consistent power outages in the Upper Pontiac area.

The resolution also requested that Hydro Quebec meet with the council of mayors to bring more transparency to the matter.

In an interview with The Equity, Allumettes Island Mayor Winston Sunstrum said he’s hoping that the council of mayors will be able to meet with Hydro Quebec sometime this month.

For Sunstrum, the outages have been very frustrating, especially for those who have thrown away large sums of money to deal with the lack of electricity.

“It’s still very concerning,” he said. “A lot of people are spending six, seven, eight thousand to get automatic generators. It’s a big expense for the people that can afford it and the people that can’t afford it have a real difficulty dealing with the outages.”

He said he knows that Hydro Quebec is aware of the problem, judging by the numerous trees marked for cutting and trimming located alongside roads in the Upper Pontiac.

But he said that many of the outages in the region could be prevented going forward and that the problem largely lies mostly with Waltham-221 being synchronized with Hydro One in Ontario as well as the lack of consistent trimming of trees in the area.

“That’s an administrative issue that if resolved would certainly reduce our outages by a lot,” he said.

While he’s optimistic that both provinces can share the same line effectively going forward, he said that the issue with Ontario outages taking effect on the other side of the river needs to be addressed as soon as possible.

“We’re still having a problem with interconnectedness with Ontario,” he said. “That speaks to an equipment problem. We know that an outage in Ontario can cause an outage here,” he said.

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