Over 2,000 residents in the upper Pontiac endured some portion of the weekend’s cold snap without any electricity after the power grid, overloaded from the surge in electrical demand as the temperatures hovered around -30 C, shut down just before 7:30 a.m. on Saturday.
“It was really cold, people get up in the morning, they start to shower, they start to make their breakfast, so then it can’t handle all of that in severe cold weather, because of the energy draw,” explained L’Isle-aux-Allumettes mayor Corey Spence, noting residents from Mansfield-et-Pontefract through to Sheenboro were affected by the outage.
“People confirmed frozen pipes,” he said. “After three or four hours in that cold, things start to freeze.”
In an emailed comment, Hydro-Québec (HQ) spokesperson Marie-Annick Gariépy said 2,493 customers were without power at the peak of the outage. She confirmed the reason for the outage was a failure at the Waltham generating station.
“Protective equipment at the Waltham power station, operated by Brookfield Energy, tripped. This caused the automatic opening of the electrical grid’s protection mechanisms,” she wrote in French.
Spence said it was not long before HQ had switched the region’s grid from Ontario to Quebec’s power network, with Mansfield regaining power by 8 a.m., but that it still took many hours for power to be restored all the way up to Sheenboro.
Gariépy said power was fully restored by mid-afternoon, around 3 p.m..
“Power was restored to customers in a gradual and controlled manner, in blocks, to avoid overloading and to restore service safely,” she wrote.
Spence said his municipality is prepared for events like this, given how frequently they occur, and set up warming shelters at its town hall in Chapeau and at the St-Joseph community hall.
“We’re always on alert. We’ve developed a process that we follow for these types of things because they’re so recurring.”
He said while he knows the community is eagerly awaiting the planned upgrades to the hydro grid which, set for 2030 or 2031, will include the building of a new substation near Fort-Coulonge, he believes Hydro-Québec needs to do more in the interim to mitigate harm caused by the outages he said are sure to continue.
“We know that these power outages are going to continue happening before they get that complete. There’s going to be another cold spell. Severe weather events are happening more and more,” he said. “So what is Hydro-Québec going to do until [the updates] happen?”
Two options, as he sees it, are either moving Mansfield residents to the Quebec grid, or installing industrial generators at critical locations “where they can be on the ready if the power is not being delivered.”
“They could be doing this and in my opinion the only reason they’re not is because of money,” Spence said.
