A powerful thunderstorm left thousands of Pontiac residents in the dark last week and into the weekend after it tore through the region on the evening of Thursday, July 24, bringing with it a downpour and strong winds. 

The municipalities of Pontiac, Bristol, Clarendon, Portage du Fort and Shawville were hardest hit, with around 5,000 homes without power immediately following the storm, thanks to the many downed trees and power lines across the region. Some 21,000 homes across the Outaouais were also hit with power outages caused by the storm. 

It wasn’t until Friday evening, and for some, Saturday morning, that most power was restored to Pontiac homes. 

“It was pretty widespread,” said Clarendon mayor Edward Walsh on Friday morning, noting his crews were out all night to clear fallen trees from the roads and from peoples properties. “The Shawville area seemed to have taken it hard.” 

Shawville mayor Bill McCleary said Hydro-Québec restored power to the Pontiac Hospital in the early hours of Friday morning, and that the town’s emergency generator was used to power the town’s well and water tower, but not its springs. 

“The springs are the town’s main drinking water source, and we use the well when the springs can’t keep up, so now we’re just on the well,” he said, adding residents should have plenty of water. On Friday morning the municipality had yet to lift the boil water advisory it had had in place since July 18 which, combined with the power outage, meant many residents did not have access to drinkable water.

The advisory was however lifted around 1 p.m. on Friday, which the municipality was unable to communicate with residents by way of its regular notification and emergency communications system because it did not have the power needed to run the internet at its town hall. 

‘It’s coming up here more’

Clarendon resident Wally Whelen was among those considering themselves lucky in the storm’s aftermath. 

He and his wife were in Renfrew when the storm touched down at their home on Radford Road, but when he finally got back on Thursday evening, he was shocked to see the wind had snapped the hydro pole on his property, which he found laying on the ground. 

A large branch had also broken off the tree in front of his house and was laying across the power line connecting his home to the grid, slowly pulling down the hydro pole across the road. 

“It’s hard to know what’s going on. Is it all this environmental stuff and that that’s causing this or what?” he wondered, looking up at his broken tree on Friday afternoon. 

“It’s getting more and more. It seems like that,” he said, referring to what he has noticed to be an increased frequency of severe storms in the area. “You heard about this, it used to be down in the states. But now it’s coming up here more.”