Ice storm aftermath: 40,000 still in the dark
About 40,000 customers are still without electricity on Monday morning, two thirds of them in Montreal. Some will not get it back before Tuesday.
Questions are being asked why the system was so vulnerable, and some are asking for preventive tree pruning.
jeather 10:12 on 2023-04-10 Permalink
Please. A friend of mine has a tree scheduled for urgent, immediate removal (by city arborists) in front of her place, and it’s been marked as such for 3 months now. (Surprisingly, as I recall, that specific tree did not fall, though others did.) They’re not going to get to preventative tree pruning.
What they should be doing is moving power lines underground, especially when they have the streets open, but that doesn’t seem upcoming.
shawn 10:28 on 2023-04-10 Permalink
On my street (Clark) there has been pruning in the recently past, sometimes rather drastically. I seems to me that it’s something that they’ve fallen behind, like so many things.
Chris 10:33 on 2023-04-10 Permalink
Moving power lines underground is *way* more expensive than a bad ice storm every 25 years.
qatzelok 10:50 on 2023-04-10 Permalink
Chris, do you have a source for your claim?
I ask this because losing heat during a cold snap could be fatal for many people, while buring hydro lines is the norm in most first-world cities of any density.
I think *the problem* is not price, it is that the suburbs are so vast and sprawling that it has made proper urban infrastruture too expensive. So North Americans get Dollarama infrastructure so they can live in bungalows.
Spi 11:08 on 2023-04-10 Permalink
Brochu and an other VP have been quoted in interviews this week and in the past as saying the cost of burying a 1km of lines is about $1M dollars.
Given how often and the frequency at which streets and sidewalks are torn up here, burying power lines just sounds like a great way to get more power outages caused by construction workers just cutting and digging without care.
I imagine burying lines wouldn’t be done at zero cost to property owners, they’d still have to rewire their homes to connect to the new underground wires. Many utility poles run through alleyways and directly above people’s property. Ask them if they’d still want the lines underground if that meant you’d have to remove all existing structures such as garages, sheds, fences etc and they they’d be prohibited from putting any permanent structures above the lines since they need to remain accessible. Best case scenario they’re buried under the alleyway but how many Ruelle Verte does that mean they need to destroy?
These calls for just burying all the lines is so shortsighted and reactionary, people don’t consider the actual implications. Burying stuff seems like an elegant solution, out of sight out of mind, but people in Montreal just have this tendency to not care what the implications are decades down the line. Underground maintenance of any infrastructure is a nightmare and costs are orders of magnitude more expensive, just look at the tunnel or the endless work at Berri-UQAM. Guess it doesn’t matter if you can shovel those costs on to the next generation.
MarcG 11:20 on 2023-04-10 Permalink
Such a calculation would need to consider the cost of all the wasted food and damage to property as well.
carswell 11:26 on 2023-04-10 Permalink
During blackouts, especially the 1998 ice storm blackout, friends in NDG were able to live half-decent lives despite losing power because they had gas heating, a fireplace and a gas stove. As society increasingly bans fossil fuels and shifts to a nearly all-electric economy, where transportation, communications, heating/cooling, refrigeration, cooking, working, etc. stop if there is no juice, the reliability of the power supply will only become more crucial, which is why we should be taking steps toward burying power lines and adding redundancy, such as rooftop solar systems that are network connected but also function independently.
Kevin 11:26 on 2023-04-10 Permalink
Lots of areas without power in Beaconsfield and Kirkland are the older parts of those cities, with old trees and old developments. I spotted one crew working on a powerline that went off St. Charles into a stand of evergreen trees which was at least 5 metres taller than the line.
If you’ve got hydro lines overhead, you’ve got to do lots of tree maintenance, which means a lot of manual labour — but it’s also rather stupid to plant trees directly under a line.
I really think Hydro has to take another look at burying lines in some areas where it’s going to save them long-term costs. Like all renovations it’ll probably cost more than doing it from scratch, but It’s obvious that we don’t have enough tree-trimmers in our society and likely never will.
carswell 11:31 on 2023-04-10 Permalink
@MarcG The calculation should also take into account that climate change is expected to make disruptions like ice storms, tornadoes and hurricane-force winds more frequent and more severe.
DeWolf 11:50 on 2023-04-10 Permalink
@carswell is exactly right. Burying hydro lines is very expensive and will take a long time, which is all the more reason to start now. François Legault said it would take $100 billion to bury all the lines, which isn’t actually that much if it’s spread out over 20 years.
Incidentally, I don’t think it’s up to Hydro Quebec to bury any lines, at least not in Montreal. That’s the job of the Commission des services électriques de Montréal, which has been burying power lines since 1910, but obviously at a glacial pace. I’m guessing it is woefully underfunded.
https://www.csem.qc.ca/
Kate 12:40 on 2023-04-10 Permalink
Looking at older houses here with cables coming in over those metal struts on the roof I sometimes think, we’ve had electricity since the 19th century, but this stuff is still tacked onto buildings like it’s a novelty that might not last.
A friend in Beaconsfield had no power till last night, it came back on, went out again (doing unspecified damage to his computer), came back on… and just now, at 1 pm Monday, it’s gone out again.
EmilyG 12:44 on 2023-04-10 Permalink
I heard that Hydro QC used to prune trees around power lines in the past, and not as much anymore.
Vazken 13:00 on 2023-04-10 Permalink
My power is mostly back? but my major appliances don’t work and I’m still on the map
Ephraim 13:15 on 2023-04-10 Permalink
Why do we expect the city to trim trees around hydro lines, why is that the responsibility of the city, rather than Hydro Quebec? Maybe Hydro should in fact have a way to ask the city to look at lines and a fee for trimming those trees?
Bert 13:32 on 2023-04-10 Permalink
It is up to Hydro to prune trees around their right-of-way. They came through here a couple of years ago and did a real job and FWIW I did not loose power. If you look at early outage maps, there was a large swath of northern Laval that had not lost power, while the southern part, West-Island, General Montreal were all affected.
It is not up to the City to prune to protect what are in fact Hydro Quebec installations.
As to who would pay for what to bury existing lines, it is my understanding that the property / installation owner is responsible for everything basically from the pole to the house. I think that the same is the case for the water mains that are being replaced in Montreal, where owners are even responsible for (paying) the work that is done from the road to the foundation. So it may be a case that there is part responsibility to get rid of the overhead high-power lines, transformers, etc. (Hydro) and then the replacement of the service lines from said transformers to individual service locations.
Then, for some installations you have to consider the shared right-of-way that Bell, Videotron, etc. have. While Hydro may bury the transformer that is 10 feet from my house, IN my yard, are they going to remove the pole that VT and B both have wires that run through it?
I think burying is the right strategy for new, and possibly dense, installations. But the retrofit of existing installations might be a step too far as an exercise for itself.
Blork 14:16 on 2023-04-10 Permalink
I don’t think the people calling for moving all wiring underground fully grasp the enormity of that task.
Think of all the digging that has been going on around Montreal for the past decade for road and sewer repairs. Now imagine doing that all over again, in this case all alleys pretty much everywhere. Every single house and building will need to be retrofitted to accommodate the new entry.
And we’re not just talking about Montreal; all the suburbs, Quebec City, all the other small cities and towns, etc.
Also consider that underground wiring doesn’t last as long as above ground, for various reasons, and has a lower maximum capacity. Underground wiring requires a lot of maintenance and that maintenance usually involves digging. Outages can occur due to accidents (unrelated nearby digging) water infusion, lightning strikes, earthquakes, etc.
And if someone said $100 Billion to do this, what they really mean is a minimum of $200 billion. That’s $24,000 for every human being in Quebec. Given the state of health care and the housing crisis, is this really where we should be spending the equivalent of 47 new Champlain bridges?
That said, all new developments should definitely be built with underground wiring. And there should be a program of high priority locations where above-ground is moved to underground, but that will most definitely become the hottest of hot potatoes in terms of where (which is to say, “who,” is high priority). And this should be seen as essentially a 100-year project, not something that can be pulled off in a decade.
BTW, this PDF does a pretty good job of pointing out some of the advantages and disadvantages, as well as the complications, of moving to underground wiring:
https://www.puc.nh.gov/2008IceStorm/ST&E%20Presentations/NEI%20Underground%20Presentation%2006-09-09.pdf
Kevin 16:02 on 2023-04-10 Permalink
Bert
The change in responsibility isn’t from the Hydro pole — it’s the mast which is physically attached to the building.
https://twitter.com/hydroquebec/status/1645442809271402497
Bert 17:04 on 2023-04-10 Permalink
Thanks for the precision Kevin. I was not sure of the exact demarcation line. That said, the point being that there would still be above ground infrastructure that would be the responsibility of the home owner to change to underground.
The picture in the link you provided made me do a double-take, as I thought it was one of my neighbours. Same colours, same siding, similar windows, even a hint of a pergola. That is very similar to our setup. I say “our” since I am in a four-wide townhouse and the my side of the house has the 4 entry points, 4 meters side-by-side.
So, say HQ buries their wires (as a retrofit), they then have to run a pole against the house back up to the “Col de Cygne”? If they get rid of the C-D-C” and run everything underground to the meter, where is the demark line? With smart meters, why even have a meter on the house?
As much as I would be for, I understand, and I want underground wires, I also understand the impracticality of just doing a bulk rip-and-replace. Perhaps someone can point to the efforts for the change from 50hz to 60hz way back when as a sort of similar story.
Sure, a new law / decree / whatever saying that for all new constructions (of a certain population density?) everything is burried, HQ, VT, B, etc. No problem with that. The cost gets handed off to the builder and thus to the new owner. I think trying to do a retrofit, as much as I would LOVE IT, is probably not going to happen.
Chris 17:25 on 2023-04-10 Permalink
>I ask this because losing heat during a cold snap could be fatal for many people
It *could* yes, but it wasn’t, was it? I believe one person died, and it wasn’t from cold.
Kate 22:32 on 2023-04-10 Permalink
Chris, that’s missing the point. Because the recent outage didn’t happen during a cold snap, it doesn’t follow that we could never lose power during a cold snap.
carswell 22:50 on 2023-04-10 Permalink
@Kate Or during an intense heat wave. Nearly 15,000 people died in France during the 2003 heat wave. Most had power but didn’t have air-conditioning. And Montrealers wouldn’t have either during a summer power outage caused by a hurricane, tornado or mega storm.
Ian 07:43 on 2023-04-11 Permalink
I can’t be the only one who wished we were still allowed fireplaces.
There were certainly a lot of cases of carbon monoxide poisoning …
James 08:52 on 2023-04-11 Permalink
The burying of hydro lines all the way right to your house would definitely be very expensive but perhaps Hydro could consider burying the higher voltage lines at also are in neighborhoods and are typically the highest ones on the poles. Right next to my house, a branch fell on a 12kV line and about 3000 houses lost power. It took 48 hours to get it repaired. The 120V lines running to your house are part of a much smaller network. If a tree falls on them only 50 houses would lose power.