Fire in manhole leaves thousands of Hydro-Québec customers without power
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Montreal Power Outage linked to Hydro-Qu e9bec infrastructure after an underground explosion and manhole fire in Rosemont–La Petite–Patrie, disrupting the STM Blue Line and forcing strategic, cold-weather grid restoration on B e9langer Street.
The Big Picture
Outage from an underground blast and manhole fire disrupted STM service; Hydro-Qu e9bec restored the grid in cold weather.
Underground explosion and manhole fire on Bélanger St caused the outage.
Peak 41,000 customers out; 10,981 still without power at 7:00 p.m.
Phased re-energization to prevent load spikes and grid overloads in cold.
Blue line back; Bélanger St reopened; equipment failure analysis pending.
Hydro-Québec says a power outage affecting Montreal is connected to an underground explosion and a fire in a manhole in Rosemont—La Petite–Patrie.
The fire started in underground pipes belonging to Hydro-Québec on Bélanger Street between Boyer and Saint-André streets, according to Montreal firefighters, who arrived on the scene at 12:18 p.m.
The electricity had to be cut so that firefighters could get into the manhole where the equipment was located.
At the peak of the shutdown, nearly 41,000 customers were without power across Montreal. As of 7:00 p.m., 10,981 clients still had no power.
In similar storms, Toronto power outages have persisted for hundreds, underscoring restoration challenges.
Hydro-Québec spokesperson Louis-Olivier Batty said the utility is being strategic about how it restores power across the grid.
Because of the cold, and patterns seen during freezing rain outages, it anticipates that people will crank up the heat as soon as they get their electricity back, and that could trigger an overload somewhere else on the network, Batty said.
The Metro's Blue line was down much of the afternoon, but the STM announced the line was back up and running just after 4:30 p.m.
Bélanger Street was blocked to traffic much of the afternoon, however, it has now been reopened.
Batty said once the smoke clears, Hydro-Québec workers will take a look at the equipment to see what failed.
