ST-LAMBERT — The south shore bedroom community of St-Lambert is a picturesque fixture on the Quebec landscape. But the rustic town with tree-lined streets also has a bit of an eye soar high in the sky: power lines. Thousands of them.
The Hydro-Quebec electric power lines are now the centre of debate to get them buried.
Many Quebec residents argue in favor of putting the lines underground to reduce the risks of power failures every time an ice storm hits or freezing rain falls.
“It’s a great idea. It would cost a huge amount of money. It would put our taxes through the roof, I’m sure. So I guess it’s something that’s not going to happen in the near future anyway,” Brian Abbott, a St-Lambert resident said outside of his home.
Eleven per cent of all Quebec hydro cables are buried. Many of those can be found along commercial boulevards such as Ste-Catherine Street in Montreal.
But more and more cables are being buried underground in new residential developments as well.
Forty-one per cent of all power lines installed in new housing projects were buried in 2012 according to Hydro-Quebec spokesperson Serge Abergel.
“Hydro-Quebec has done so in different areas, in new developments,” he told Global News Monday.
But the costs make it prohibitive to bury more lines.
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Abergel says it costs ten times the price to install a line underground compared to above ground.
For instance, building one kilometer of a Hydro-Quebec power line above ground costs $100,000 compared to $1 million for the same line below ground.
It’s a similar situation in Ontario.
Toronto Hydro estimates it would cost $15 billion to bury all of its lines in Canada’s largest city.
But city officials in St-Lambert argue the public utility company should make more of an effort to share the costs of burying lines.
The public works director, Ronald Laurin, says plans to bury power lines on Riverside Road were scrapped in 2011 after Hydro-Quebec offered to pay only seven per cent, or $1 million, of the $15 million projected price tag.
“It’s nothing compared to the total costs. So we didn’t feel like is was something they cared about in that way,” Laurin said.
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