NDG residents and business owners are fed up with constant power outages

On any given day this summer, not even a particularly stormy or windy one, the power may have been out in Montreal's Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighbourhood (NDG). 

Residents here say they're frequently without electricity, particularly over the past six months or so — and it's frustrating, both to locals, many of whom are seniors, and business owners.

"It's so frequent that you're just scared it's going to go out," Liem Tran, the owner of the Kiku Japanese restaurant on Monkland Avenue, said in an interview. "It's kind of a big headache to deal with the situation."

The power outages, which Hydro-Québec blames on difficult conditions and aging infrastructure in the area, have pushed some locals to their breaking point. 

Catherine Fichten, who lives on Monkland Avenue near Girourard Avenue, began to track the outages, keeping detailed notes: how long they lasted and when they occurred. 

By her tally, some homes in the area have been without power for approximately 85 hours since the spring, when a major ice storm toppled trees and kept some people out of power for days. 

A Hydro-Québec spokesperson said their analysts found that it was probably closer to 70 hours, but Fichten said they're splitting hairs. 

"Even if it's 70, that's a heck of a lot of hours for four months," she said, "a lot of hours to be out and there were no storms, no reasons for some of them to be out, some of them happened at night, some of them happened during the day."

Fichten and other residents in the area have had to take steps to prepare for having no power. 

Fichten was often waking up to her digital alarm clock flashing because of an overnight outage. The clock had made her late for work and it was flashing so frequently that, eventually, she got rid of it. Now, she uses her cellphone as an alarm clock — and always keeps it charged. 

Pat Hardt, who lives opposite Fichten, says she has stocked up on flashlights, strategically placed throughout her home to be ready for an overnight outage. "I don't want to trip and fall," she said. 

Other neighbours of theirs use CPAP machines, which help people with sleep apnea breathe while sleeping. When the power goes out, the machines stop working and they have a hard time getting rest, Fichten said. 

"Recently, it's been more often and disturbingly often," Hardt said, "and we've got more restaurants on this street in the last year or two and I can't imagine how they're handling that."

Not well, Tran, the owner of Kiku, said. 

Tran lost thousands of dollars worth of fish and vegetables during the spring ice storm and, as the outages continued, he had to close his restaurant, send staff home, and buy a hefty generator to keep his freezers running whenever the power goes out. 

Numerous causes, including aging substation

Hydro-Québec blamed the frequent outages on a mix of things: NDG has some of the oldest trees in the city and their fragile limbs that hang over power lines are prone to breaking in strong winds.

There has been some bad luck, too: a few emergencies, including a gas leak that forced the state-owned utility to shut power to part of the neighbourhood. 

"Every time there's going to be an ice storm or a wind storm, they're more susceptible to having more outages but we are working toward solutions," Hydro-Québec spokesperson Geneviève Fortin-Blanchard, who grew up in NDG, said in an interview.

Ultimately, "the year 2023 has been unmatched, it's been a strange year," she added. Forest fires, an issue with the Churchill Falls power plant and frequent storms have added to the chaos. 

But it was a mixture of those things and some of the Hydro-Québec infrastructure in the area that made NDG particularly vulnerable. 

The Hampstead substation, where high voltage power gets transformed into lower voltage ready to be distributed to neighbourhoods in the west end, is due for an upgrade. 

Hydro-Québec has already begun the process of replacing the substation with one in Côte-Saint-Luc, but the project is in its early stages.

Fortin-Blanchard said the new substation, when it's built, should make the NDG grid more resilient. 

But Fitchen and her neighbours hope things improve soon. 

"Please fix it," Hardt said.