Power outage in Montreal neighbourhood still unresolved, surpasses 72-hour mark

The power outage in Montreal's Saint-Michel neighbourhood has now gone well over the 72-hour mark, but Hydro-Québec says it has been able to restore power to some customers through mobile generators it deployed to the affected area.

As of late Monday night, Hydro-Québec said the outage affected about 1,200 homes in Saint-Michel, in an area near Pie-IX Boulevard between 44th Street and 54th Street.

By Monday night, about a quarter of the affected customers had power back thanks to the generators. In an update from Hydro-Québec Tuesday morning, the company says its generators have now brought back power to 60 per cent of the affected customers. That's about 720 addresses.  

The outage began Saturday at around 2:40 a.m.

In a statement to CBC News late Monday night, Hydro-Québec said it was able to restore service to the problematic power line at around 5:30 p.m., but an hour later, the power went out again.

At that moment, the utility said, it went ahead with its plan to deploy about 12 generators across the affected area and it expects all the affected addresses to be running on generators by noon, Tuesday. 

"These are mobile generators that are the size of an 18-wheeler, which makes their installation complex in an urban setting, but we're putting forth all the necessary efforts with multiple teams," reads the statement from Hydro-Québec.

"As for the work to repair the power line, our teams are still on the field to try and locate the source of this outage and fix it to restore service as quickly as possible."

The company says the generators will remain in place until the issue is fixed permanently.

As a result, the borough of Villeray–Saint-Michel–Parc-Extension has opened three shelters for families to stay overnight and keep warm:

Hydro-Québec says it has 14 teams on the field working to fix the problem.