CALEB NICKERSON
ALLUMETTE ISLAND
Feb. 6, 2019
An Allumette Island resident is raising concerns about the quality of electrical service in his region, an area that has been dogged with interruptions and surges for years.
David Gillespie has been tracking outages on his farm since 2009, using a simple timer and spreadsheet.
By his calculations, there was a sizable increase in the duration of outages from 2017 to 2018, jumping from 784 minutes to 2,802.
“People started calling me because there were a few outages and they started to be long,” he said. “In terms of total number of minutes, it’s almost four times as long.”
The end of summer was particularly bad, with 14 outages in July and nine in September.
The issues came to a head back in June of 2016, when a lengthy outage was followed by a massive surge that caused huge amounts of property damage in the community. Local officials formed an emergency committee that met with Hydro Quebec officials and MNA André Fortin later that year.
In 2017, conditions seemed to improve, but this January was one of the worst in Gillespie’s books, with five outages totalling 139 minutes.
“The first one was an hour and a half but on the second of January you don’t want an hour and a half because you don’t know if it’s going to be three hours or a day,” he said, noting that he had lambs freeze to death during an outage in 2011. “If it’s minus 30, it’s not good.”
Though he now heats his lambing area with an exterior woodstove, Gillespie worries that the poor service will hinder economic growth in the region and encouraged his neighbours to contact Fortin’s office with their concerns.
“It’s not just the hydro issue, there’s a bigger picture here,” he said. “If you want young people to come up here to establish a business, be it agriculture or any other small business, they want infrastructure.”
