Faced with numerous recurrent power outages in its territory and equipped with a petition from citizens, the municipality of Cookshire-Eaton has asked Hydro-Québec to intervene to resolve the situation. The government-owned company says it has already started making corrections.
The problem of power failures is not new; many citizens and business people are exasperated by the situation. Gilles Denis, owner of the Cookshire IGA, mentioned having suffered a break in service 13 times during 2021, varying from 12 hours to a few seconds for an approximate total of 48 hours. A petition was launched by a citizen, Mya Kitty, deprived of electricity for 22 hours on December 12. Some 200 signatures were added to the petition denouncing the situation and asking the municipality to intervene with Hydro-Québec. The mayor of Cookshire-Eaton, Mario Gendron, said he has taken the file in hand and had a discussion on January 10 with the representative of Hydro-Québec, Ève-Marie Jodoin, relations counsellor for the Estrie region, to find out the intentions of the Crown corporation and obtain written confirmation of what it intended to do.
The press release issued by the municipality of Cookshire-Eaton notes that Hydro-Québec has analyzed the outages and that solutions have been proposed. Among them, it is reported that the main cause of outages in the sector is vegetation that comes into contact with the network during bad weather. The government-owned company has therefore agreed to speed up vegetation control in the sector, that is to say the pruning and/or felling of dangerous trees, to the first part of 2022. It is expected that this operation will quickly lead to an improvement in the quality of service.
In addition, it is specified that workers will patrol the electrical network that supplies the sector to detect if there are technical anomalies and to make improvements during routine maintenance work. The electricity-provider reports that remote-controlled circuit breakers have already been installed on the lines to shorten the recovery time during outages.
Mayor Gendron said he has requested statistics on the various circuits that run through the territory in order to determine which ones break down, the number of times in a year, and the duration. “I want to know what the situation is. Is there a circuit more problematic than others? The mayor added that the Hydro-Québec representative was not able to provide this information, but that it would be possible later. Mayor Gendron clearly intends to follow up in May or June to find out how the file is progressing.
Although a number of citizens claim that the network is outdated, the mayor maintains that he is unable to confirm that is so. “The person from Hydro-Québec tells me: we are doing the analysis, I cannot say that these are circuits that are old and have not been maintained; I have not patrolled them. What we do know is that we have a lot of breakdowns. That suggests that there are things, either the vegetation, or the equipment is worn out, or there is not enough of it on the circuit. We can guess all that when we have a lot of breakdowns.”
For his part, Mr. Denis remains skeptical about the effectiveness of the various interventions. He believes that the network is outdated. Mr. Denis believes that there are major deficiencies. Hydro-Québec has indicated that it is following the file with great interest.