Power outages: nearly 9,000 Montreal homes still without electricity

Six days after the ice storm that plunged half the city into darkness, Montrealers are still without power.

Six days after the ice storm that broke tree branches and plunged almost 500,000 Montreal homes into darkness, residents of the metropolis are still without power.

As of 9:30 a.m. Tuesday, the outages affected 8,778 Hydro-Quebec customers on the island of Montreal. If, after the storm, the sectors of the west of the metropolis, Mont-Royal, Outremont, Villeray–Saint-Michel–Parc-Extension and Mile-End were the most affected, the outages are now more distributed.

There are 303 areas without power, according to Hydro-Quebec. This therefore represents 29 customers per outage, on average. On April 6, the day after the ice storm, the average number of customers per outage was around 500 across Quebec. The state-owned company must therefore now manage much smaller outages, which explains the slower pace of the return of electricity.

Hydro-Québec still managed to reconnect 480,000 customers residing on the island of Montreal in five days. The state-owned utility says if customers are left without power after yesterday, it's because of outages where there are more complex issues.

With these smaller outages, all sectors of the city are affected. The concentration of power outages remains high in Outremont. Nearly 640 Hydro-Québec customers, out of 9,410 Outremont households, are still in the dark in this particularly wooded borough, which was almost entirely without electricity.

The west of the metropolis was also almost entirely without power after the storm, but the power has been restored there, with the exception of rare small sectors which are still in the dark.