STEPHEN RICCIO
L’ÎSLE AUX ALLUMETTES Jan. 13, 2021
For residents of L’Îsle aux Allumettes, 2020 made for a significantly better year than 2019 with respect to power outages, with the total decreasing from 103 to 47.
Local farmer David Gillespie keeps a detailed log of the outages, including . . .
the length of each outage, and has been doing so since 2009. He said that while 2019 was an unusually outage-filled year, the 2020 numbers are still encouraging.
The average time per outage was 34.4 minutes, compared to only 26 minutes per outage in 2019, but down from the 12-year average of 42 minutes per outage. Twenty-three of the outages were less than a minute long, which means more than 50 per cent of the outages were longer than a minute.
“We’re down to 47 shorter outages, and so if you compare it to the 12-year average [of 57] we’re obviously better,” Gillespie said.
“What was unusual I noticed this year is that there were four out of the 47 outages were at night between nine at night and 7:30 in the morning,” he added.
Gillespie explained that typically an average of 40 per cent of the outages occur at night, and he had no explanation for why that number went down to eight per cent last year. He said that might not seem like a relevant difference, but a higher proportion of outages during the daytime translates to more interruptions to things that people rely on during business hours: the Picanoc internet tower, local businesses, or the Caisse Populaire.
Gillespie said that while less outages in 2020 was encouraging, 47 outages is still an unacceptable number.
“Well my friends in Ottawa and Montreal … they get a few a year and they get pretty excited if it’s more than four or five a year,” Gillespie said. “My friends that live on farms south and north and east and west of Montreal get pretty excited if there’s more than one a month. So as far as I’m concerned, being rural, we shouldn’t get more than 12 a year, or one a month.”
The most significant period of time without power last year spanned two days, July 10 to July 11. Gillespie said that he counts an extended outage that stretches several days as separate outages. Those outages began at 1:02 p.m. on July 10 and ran until 2:55 a.m. on July 11, for a total of 833 minutes, or 13 hours and 53 minutes, without power.
“I was in the field trying to finish my hay, there was a strong wind,” he explained. “It knocked big trees down on the power lines, and that’s no one’s fault, that just [happens].”
Gillespie said that he is aware of Hydro Quebec performing repair/maintenance work on the line that he monitors, line 221, at least three times during 2020, as they notified residents of planned outages in September, October and December.
The other line that serves the surrounding Municipalities of Sheenboro and Chichester as well as the village of Chapeau is line 224. Gillespie said that while he doesn’t keep track of line 224 as rigorously as line 221, he is familiar enough to say that they dealt with similar outage conditions last year.
L’Îsle aux Allumettes Mayor Winston Sunstrum said in an email to The Equity that the decrease in outages was a positive for the community. He added that he had a conversation with Hydro Quebec’s Alain Paquette on Dec. 10 to discuss a variety of concerns that residents brought to him.
