11 hours ago
Fête Nationale power outages: Few Hydro-Quebec employees wanted to work
Dangerous weather and an intense thunderstorm left more than 100,000 households in and around Quebec City without power on Monday night.
After receiving notice of the high volume of blackouts, Hydro-Quebec says it quickly got to work to resolve the issue, but hit a wall when it started making phone calls to employees.
'It's been difficult in terms of mobilizing our teams, partly because of the holiday,' explained Hydro-Quebec spokesperson Louis-Olivier Batty in an interview with Noovo Info.
READ MORE: Thousands without power during extreme heat after storm rolls through Quebec City area
He points out that on public holidays, Hydro-Quebec expects a response rate of between 40 and 50 per cent from employees.
On Tuesday, the Fête Nationale, the public utility company says barely 10 per cent of workers answered the urgent call.
'We had to quickly call on outside resources to lend a hand,' said Batty.
In the end, Hydro-Quebec says it turned to the Administrative Labour Tribunal to force its employees to perform.
In its ruling, the tribunal declared that the workers' lack of response constituted a concerted effort that deprived or could have deprived the public of an entitled service.
It ordered them to take action.
In response, the workers' union says it has taken note of the court's decision and intends to cooperate fully.
However, it adds that the situation highlights shortcomings in Hydro-Quebec's planning when it comes to management and predictability of work.
On Wednesday, more than 800,000 Hydro-Quebec workers were back in the field, with 10,000 customers still without electricity.
'When we have events like Monday, with a lot of outages and a lot of damage, we quickly carry out work on outages that restore a lot of customers at once,' said Batty. 'On Wednesday, we were dealing with a lot of small outages where we were restoring between five and 20 customers at a time.'
