The winds, which in some places reached 100 km/hr, according to Hydro-Québec, snapped, twisted and uprooted trees, wreaking havoc to homes and power lines from Allumette Island to Luskville.

Immediately following the storm’s passing, over 5,000 people across the Pontiac had been disconnected from the grid, a small slice of the 144,000 people across the province who were without electricity at the peak of the outage on Tuesday night.

The Outaouais and Laurentides regions were hardest hit in the province, according to Hydro-Québec spokesperson Karine Godin.

By Wednesday at 12 p.m., 33 separate outages were still leaving 3,992 people without power in the Pontiac.

While Hydro-Québec’s website predicted Wednesday morning most places would have power restored by 12 p.m. Wednesday, Godin said the work to clear the wreckage caused by the storm would likely take longer, pushing restoration into Wednesday evening and Thursday.

By Friday at noon, only 75 or so people were still without power.

The storm caused this tree to topple onto the Sand Bay cottage behind it. Photo: Sophie Kuijper Dickson.

“[The storm] threw a lot of trees around that broke poles and threw lines to the ground, so it’s going to be more complicated than a simple restoration because it’s going to involve cleaning up the trees and reinstalling hydro poles,” Godin told THE EQUITY in French.

“It’s difficult to be precise about how much time it’s going to take, because it’s hard to evaluate when the work needed is to first remove trees from the road to enable hydro workers to get to the site of the outage [to assess the damage].”

She said 28 hydro teams had been deployed across the Outaouais, and another 10 would be coming from Abitibi-Témiscamingue to support them.

She could not specify how many hydro teams had been deployed to the Pontiac, but said they would be working until 11 p.m., at which point they would take a break and resume work in the morning.

‘War zone’ in Sand Bay

Clarendon mayor Edward Walsh said municipal workers responded almost immediately to calls from Sand Bay residents on Tuesday evening about trees that had fallen across roads.

“In Sand Bay, it’s a war zone down there [ . . . ] Trees falling on roofs and punching holes in the roofs, shingles blowing off, a tree landed on a boat down there and squashed somebody’s boat. There’s extensive damage,” he said, reporting what he had heard from some of the municipal workers who had spent the night clearing roads.

“Our guys have been down there since yesterday so they’ve got all the roads and that opening. Now they’re checking on the rest of Clarendon because there’s trees down across the whole municipality.”

The Municipality of Clarendon has opened its brush dump today, Apr. 30, for residents clearing branches and trees from their properties.

Two over-hundred-year-old red pines fell on top of Wayne Park’s family cottage, which he said is the oldest in Sand Bay. Photo: Sophie Kuijper Dickson.

Wayne Park was among those investigating the wreckage in Sand Bay on Wednesday morning. His family’s cottage, the oldest in Sand Bay he said, had several of the property’s towering red pine trees fall on its roof.

“It’s been in the family since forever,” he said, sharing he was devastated when he first saw the damage it had suffered yesterday, and surprised to see some of the trees’ top halves had been twisted right off their trunks.

“It looks as if some limbs have gone through the cottage, and the hydro at the back is off, and the storage area at the back has to be completely redone.”

Storm chaser catches ‘turning clouds’ in Luskville

Half an hour downriver in Luskville, the winds seemed to cause almost tornado-like destruction, ripping off the tops of several large pine trees along Highway 148.

Mathieu Lussier, a storm chaser who traveled from the Montreal area because he had heard there was a risk of a tornado forecast for the region, was parked on the side of the highway near some of the damages after the storm had passed.

“I could see the clouds turning, I could see the rotation on my radar, and I followed the turning clouds, and then we got a white wall,” he said, describing the weather event. “There are good signs this was possibly a tornado, but not confirmed.”

Strong winds ripped off the tops of these tall pine trees along Highway 148 in Luskville. Photo: Sophie Kuijper Dickson.

Pontiac mayor Roger Larose said damage across his municipality was not too bad, aside from the many fallen trees. The big issue for him, he said, was the power outage.

“We have no hydro, in Quyon especially, we have no hydro for the water plant. We got a generator to run it there, but we’re still waiting on hydro.”

He said he had not heard anything from Hydro-Québec about planned restoration time.

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